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 in an effort to impress a Tinder date. A group of teenage girls play a dangerous game and discover a portal to another reality. Good Victory explores the strangeness and absurdity of being human in the twenty-first century: high school dances, teen pregnancy, and the continued cultural relevance of Wayne’s World; fatalistic obsessions with karaoke bars and Dolly Parton; supposed pimps hiding under the Calgary Stampede watchtower. Both unsettling and illuminating, these stories shine light in dark places.

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.

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Praise for Mikka Jacobsen

". . . the ethos is reminiscent of Sheila Heti—unafraid to reveal its own intellect as it pushes through doubts, romanticisms and conventional delusions, toward revelation and a shimmering, precarious clarity."

Alberta Views

"In these taut, revelatory, slyly wry tales of sinister neighbours, distracted mothers, careless dads, and bad friends, Mikka Jacobsen probes the darkness that lurks around the edges of childhood and young womanhood with a gaze as unflinching and unsettling as Heather O’Neill’s."4

Lisa Alward