Beliefs, superstitions, and tales about luck are present across all human cultures. Humans are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history, and our own era is no exception to the rule.

Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck's presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Analyzing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narratives taken from literature, film, music, television, and theatre, from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, Pinocchio to Cimino, Curtiz to Kieslowski, it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns, and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.