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.

Mikka Jacobsen is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Calgary, Alberta. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Missouri Review, and Lit Hub, among others. Modern Fables, a collection of essays, is her debut book.

Mikka Jacobsen's profile page

"These essays are wicked. As in wickedly good, wickedly funny, wickedly smart, but also just plain wicked. They will corrupt everything you thought you knew about love and relationships: they will make you suspicious of your friends and lusty for your enemies; you won't trust anyone anymore ever except for Jacobsen herself as she crashes at rabbit-quick speed through all the ‘fables’ we tell ourselves about modern love and how to behave in this digital age. Jacobsen distinguishes herself from the very first sentence in the very first essay as a writing virtuoso. I love this book about love so, so, so much I can't stand it."

Suzette Mayr