Both utterly contemporary and a time-capsule of nineteen-seventies Soho, written in the kind of contagiously interior, manically piqued prose that starts to infiltrate the rhythms of a reader's thought, Modern Love is every bit the precocious classic heralded by this reissue. The reading is both breezy and bewildering: scenes and sentences recur to different, or the same, results, and a nutritious historical excursus on the Spanish Armada intervenes at perplexing length, only to effortlessly collide with the present. Let it illumine your commute.
— Cam
I hate the second half of this book and I still consider this one of my favorite novels because the first half is so good. If you're at all interested in Downtown NYC in the 70s or interested in experimental genre shifting novels I highly recommend this.
— LexiConstance DeJong's debut novel, back in print
"People used to tell me, if you keep on writing maybe you'll make a name for yourself," New York-based artist and writer Constance DeJong (born 1950) wrote in Modern Love. "They were right: My name's Constance DeJong. My name's Fifi Corday. My name's Lady Mirabelle, Monsieur Le Prince, and Roderigo. Roderigo's my favorite name. First I had my father's name, then my husband's, then another's. I don't know. I don't want to know the cause of anything." Modern Love, DeJong's first book, was published in 1977 by Standard Editions, an imprint co-founded by DeJong and Dorothea Tanning. In 1978, the text was adapted into a 60-minute radio program accompanied by the "Modern Love Waltz," a piano composition by Philip Glass. In this new edition, DeJong's debut novel is brought back into print, her dissonant shifts of voice and inimitable staccato rhythm made available to a new generation of readers.