While every generation wrongly believes that it invented sex, millennials uniquely believe that they invented the ‘sad girl.’ Read the first page of any contemporary novel written by an up-and-coming MFA graduate that is marketed as ground-breaking, vulnerable, and necessary, and you can immediately expect to strap yourself in for three-hundred plus pages of disappointing sex and complicated histrionics. It’s humbling then, to realise that all of this was done earlier and done better. Before there was Kathy Acker, before there was Chris Kraus, before there was Ottessa Mosfegh, there was Constance de Jong. “Everywhere I go, I see losers” de Jong begins, and so kick-starts a kaleidoscopic novel jumping between genres, modes, characters and time. de Jong’s book has a speed and immediacy that carries you along on the page. The word modern comes from the latin modo meaning ‘just now’ and one of the greatest etymological paradoxes in Art is the fact that nothing can be described as modern — modern architecture, modern literature, modern music — unless it is happening right now. The moment it stops being created, and has come into creation, it is already no longer modern. How rare it is, then, to read a book like Modern Love — one that feels like it is being written in the very moment that you are reading it.

w12xh18cm
224 pages
Paperback