Some years ago the poet Rob Halpern, in that OMG-you-haven’t-read-him? way that we have about the authors we are passionate about, insisted that I read Bob Glück. Enabling my impending addiction to the author, Rob gave me early editions of Glück’s novel Jack the Modernist and his first book of prose, Elements of a Coffee Service. Now I, too, am a Glück pusher. I have taught his work repeatedly and shiver and shudder to think I might have lived without reading his original, tasty, and oh-so-queerly reflexive rom-com. If I may borrow the expression, he is a writer’s writer’s writer, rotating, as he has, at the axis of intersecting literary cults that have radiated brilliance outward, anon. But in fact, with his disarming tone, his highbrow/lowbrow narrative aesthetics, and the luminous precision of his autobiographical insight, he is any reader’s writer. His self-teasing and his striving to be awake as he tells his true stories are, I think, ways of befriending and including us, the very dear reader. Gossip and friendship are central to Glück’s oeuvre, particularly his friendship with Bruce Boone, whose own collection of stories (tellingly entitled My Walk with Bob) is regarded as a core text of the New Narrative movement, said to have stemmed from Glück’s writing workshops in his Noe Valley home in San Francisco.

Part of the pleasure in reading Glück lies in the loosening of the grip of certain rigid self-hyphenations: self-judgment, self-destitution, self-protection, self-abandonment. Roland Barthes meets Groucho Marx; observant wit meets existentialist slapstick. If to ridicule is to imply you have nothing in common with your victim, to intelligently tease is to give the other (reader, lover, friend) a chance to feel equal to the relentless dilemma of herself, i.e., forget self-help books: read Proust, Barthes, and Glück and know your scandalous self. From Jack the Modernist: “Getting fucked and masturbated produces an orgasm that can be read in two ways, like the painting of a Victorian woman with her sensual hair piled up who gazes into the mirror of her vanity table. Then the same lights and darks reveal a different set of contours: her head becomes one eye, the reflection of her face another eye and her mirror becomes the dome of a grinning skull/woman/skull/woman/skull—I wanted my orgasm to fall between those images. That’s not really a place. I know. The pious Victorian names his visual pun ‘Vanity.’ I rename it ‘Identity.’ ”

Glück is the author of nine books of poems and narratives, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist; a book of stories, Denny Smith; a book of poems and...