Mikka Jacobsen
Mikka Jacobsen
Debut stories about the absurdity of growing up and being human in the twenty-first century.A woman finds her childhood friend working in a booth at a psychic fair in the West Edmonton Mall courtyard. A lonely neuropsychology student steals cocaine from his lab rat to impress a Tinder date. Teenage girls play a dangerous game and discover a portal to another reality. These penetrating stories explore the strangeness and absurdity of being human in the twenty-first century: high school dances and teen pregnancy, bearded ladies and neighbourhood flashers, life coaches and Dolly Parton karaoke. Both unsettling and illuminating, Good Victory shines light in dark places.
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.