National Network for Equitable Library Service

Modern Fables is a darkly funny, feminist collection of essays about love and place. In this darkly funny book about love in the digital age, Mikka Jacobsen challenges the notion that a single woman in her thirties writing about love is simply desperate. Instead, in an unflinching collage of coming-of-age narratives, she both elevates singledom and upholds the value of finding profound love. A work of feminist thinking, these interlinked essays blend memoir with cultural and literary criticism, exploring first loves and teenage drug-slingers, sports culture and blowjobs, catfishing and the problematic advice of self-help gurus. At the same time, Modern Fables considers how we are shaped as much by the places we are from as by the times in which we live. Growing up and living in the deeply conservative Canadian prairies, what does it mean when you're not at home at home? Whether she's writing about a settler mother's forays into shamanism in "The Indian Act" or considering the favourite writer of every Calgary man's online-dating profile in "Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder," Mikka Jacobsen pulls no punches, delivering a fiery manifesto on love and place for our times.