As is the case with many anthologies, the stories were hit and miss. I enjoyed some, others I skimmed over.

Very good read about loss, love and redemption. Nice variety of stories. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving this book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

I admit I’m a total sucker and loved this along with the podcast and tv series. But I also have friends who abhor this column so if you’re already a fan, you’ll enjoy. If not, no clue!!

I thought I would enjoy this more than I actually did. Instead, I found it slightly boring and ended up skimming lots of pages. Maybe it just wasn’t my genre or type of stories that were included. Nevertheless, i would give it about two and a half stars.

I think the Modern Love column is really good for thesis driven essays--I wish some of these had more surprise, but it started to feel a little like a set way to write a Modern Love column, a set structure. Overall, good. love the cover.

RATING: 3 STARS
2019; Crown Publishing/Broadway Books

This collection of essays are a revised and updated edition. It has been reissued for the release of the Amazon Prime show by the same name. While I am interested in watching the TV series at some point (it has amazing actors), it was not the reason I choose to read this book. I am interested in the personal essays surrounding dating, love, relationships and the psychology and science behind it. I am working on a writing project and am trying to read as much literature I can in the genre. I was also interested in this collection as they were published in a column called Modern Love. They are written by different writers (various years) with one subject in common, modern love. I went into the book with a higher expectation that I should not have had. I automatically get excited when a book I have not read gets turned into a movie/show. I think, wow this book must be amazing to be chosen. Sometimes just the idea is taken and it is super loose on the events in the book. Other times it tries to hard to be faithful and lacks the magic that imagination has. I have not seen the show (and may update my review once/if I watch it) so I can judge this book and it's writing. Like any collection, some essays were stronger than others - more entertaining, better written, etc. With a collection of various writers it can either be great as some authors will speak more to you than others, and it can suck as you only like one or two writers. In this collection, I started to read every essay but finished maybe 2/3 and liked 1/3 of those. I think as articles these would be more appealing, but as a book I just found them too much of the same and started to get bored. I tried to read them in chunks to get through the book quicker but it only seemed to slow me down as I was slower to pick it back up. I am a bit less excited to see the show now, but maybe the show just took the idea of the book, rather than the stories themselves.

i>***I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss & NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.***

There's no way to love Daniel Jones' New York Times column Modern Love, and not fall head over heels for this book.
An anthology of the column's best essays, Modern Love, Revised and Updated features stories of love, tragedy, friendship and parenting that any reader can relate to.

This is a charming fun read, perfect for Valentine's Day or just when you want to be cheered up. Some of my favorite stories include "Truly, Madly, Guiltily," "When Eve and Eve bit the Apple," and "Misery loves Fried Chicken, Too." The way the book is broken up by sections is really nice, its easy to pick the right story for the mood you're in. Even though I'm a fairly frequent reader of the Modern Love column in the New York Times, it was nice to revisit these stories. The one thing I would have liked was an update on some of the much older chapters. My book club is reading this in February and I can't wait to discuss it with them.

This is a gem of a collection and highly recommended for fans of the column and new devotees alike. It truly is a collection of what love looks like in our modern world and how some things change and some things stay the same
As always, read the book before diving into the series!

3.5 stars. Easy read, enjoyed some stories more than others. Looking forward to watching the Amazon series now to see how it compares. Overall, a decent read, have already recommended to a few friends!

I'd totally recommend this book and I'm so excited it's finally publishing. I will be posting a well detailed review tomorrow on my blog and on here too... can't wait

Probably my favorite thing about the New York Times is reading the Modern Love column. You never know what to expect: a love story that sounds almost too good to be true, a platonic bond that pulls at your heartstrings, a tale that makes you smile because you’ve experienced the story’s beats before. That is the beauty of Modern Love - the range of stories mimics life, no one story is the same. How Daniel Jones managed to select these stories from the rich archive is outstanding. Too many favorites, I loved every moment of reading this book.

These stories are like little gems, the ones you call your friends and say...did you hear about....
Written as small glimpses of lives for a media column, each tale is a complete love story and not always with a happy ending. I love anthologies as they introduce new authors into my reading, lending anticipation of discovery to the reading experience and often adding new names to my favorites. This is a great book to read and share.

I’ve been a fan and avid reader of the “Modern Love” column since the day I began subscribing to The New York Times a decade ago. These true-life essays are often poignant, stranger than fiction, intimate insights into love in all its iterations. As first-person accounts with dramatic story arcs that practically leap off the page, “Modern Love” begs for a more multidimensional rendering. The New York Times took note, launching a Modern Love podcast. (I’m a subscriber and enthusiastic listener) and recently Amazon Studios’ launched a scripted streaming series also called Modern Love available on Amazon Prime.

After years of reading “Modern Love,” I was thrilled to revisit some of my favorite essays in the book, Modern Love, cleverly timed to release as the title becomes a bonafide brand in the entertainment industry. I predict a Modern Love movie is the next adaptation of the popular column.

Modern Love, the book, is edited by Daniel Jones, editor of the “Modern Love” column in the New York Times since its inception in 2004. Jones also appears weekly on the Modern Love podcast and is a consulting producer for Amazon Prime’s Modern Love.

Jones has a challenging job curating the thousands of published essays into compilation organized by four themes: Somewhere Out There; I Think I Love You; Holding on Through the Curve; and Family Matters.

I was able to read and watch several essays that simultaneously made it into the book and the streaming series including So He Looked LIke Dad. It was Just Dinner Right, a fatherless twenty-something’s misguided attempt at bonding with an older man at work. The relationship implodes when they realize they have different agendas. When Cupid is a Prying Journalist, a confession from the founder of a successful dating site that he was in love once but had his heart broken, plays well on TV too.

Other essays such as In Beyond Divorce and Even Death, a Promise Kept, chronicle internal struggles, less suited for the screen but soul-stirring on the page. In this essay, the author with raw honesty describes her decision to divorce not because the marriage was bad but because it was good. “We were still friends. We didn’t have big fights. All in all, we had a pretty good marriage, and so we spent a lot of time discussing the necessity of divorce,” she writes. Realizing they are “less husband and wife than tenants living in the same house,” the author questions whether a partnership without romance in marriage good enough? “We shared a history and children, but what we had did not quite add up to a marriage.”

My favorite and most memorable essay in the book, Modern Love and is the tear-jerker, You May Want to Marry My Husband,” by best-selling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who died of ovarian cancer in 2017, ten days after the essay was published in The New York Times. Amy writes her husband’s dating profile in hopes of finding him a wife after she dies. She plays matchmaker to her soon-to-be widowed husband in hopes that “the right person reads it and finds her husband and another love story begins.”

A brief author bio follows each essay that left me wanting more. Ideally, an epilogue would follow each essay telling me the rest of the author’s love story. Where did they end up and with who and why? Was there a happy ending? Instead, most essays are open-ended leaving the possible outcomes up to my imagination.

Jones, in his introduction to the book, says he picked tales that “pry open the oyster shell of human love to reveal the dark beauty within.” Modern Love chronicles all the messiness of human love, revealing there are no rules that govern the human heart when it comes to romance. You love who you love. That’s all we can ever know. As Jones succinctly says: “That’s love. Anyone can have it. All it requires is a little bravery. Or a lot.”

Jones is also the author of nonfiction books The Bastard on the Couch and Love Illuminated and the work of fiction, After Lucy.

This book was incredibly different from what I normally read. And I absolutely loved it. Love is such a unique experience, and to see it through the eyes of so many was fantastic.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC copy of "Modern Love"
. Before reading this book I was unaware of the New York Times colum "Modern Love". I enjoyed this book of essays very much. As you read through each essay you cannot help but find at least one detail no matter how small that you can see your self in the story and/or have experienced the same thought or pain that being in love can cause.

Read this book no matter the current state of your love life---you will learn something about understanding yourself and others that you may never have considered before.

For years, in the off chance that I happened to pick up a physical copy of The New York Times, the very first column I always looked at was Modern Love. Unfortunately, newspapers are hard to come by in my day-to-day life, but, shocking to no one, podcasts are not. So imagine my joy a few years ago when I saw that the column was being made into a podcast with celebrities narrating the stories of love, loss, and redemption that would go on to cause me to stifle tears on the subway and recount the stories to my co-workers waiting at the end of my commute.
When I saw that the column was also being made into a book, I knew that I would be picking up a copy in some way or another. As expected, while reading Modern Love the book, I continued to be touched by the shared human experience of love-be it romantic, friendship, parent/child, or even the distinctly big city bond held between young women and their doormen. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Modern Love was not so much the specific stories (which are all beautiful and eloquently written), but how the stories forced me to compare my perception of what it means to love to those of others, and more often than not, to see many more similarities than differences, specifics of the stories aside. Of course, certain stories stand out above others (a woman navigating her husband's transition to being a woman, Dan Savage's journey of navigating an open adoption in which his son's birth mother is homeless), but all are stories about shared humanity and empathy in a world that constantly throws curveballs.

Such a fun short story collection! Loved this one!

Many thanks to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher. All opinions are my own.

If you're into short stories, what's not to love about Modern Love? There is something for everyone in this compilation of short essays from The New York Times. They are touching, funny, heartbreaking - any emotion you want to feel, guaranteed you will find it in here somewhere. Everyone has such a different writing style as well which mixes it up and keeps it interesting.

If you kept up with the Modern Love column in the NYT, you'll remember many of these letters. If, like me, you were an occasional reader, the breadth of these stories will be striking. Writings range from tales of the banal modern issues of online dating, texting, swiping right, etc., to the uncomfortable issues of marriage and parenting too the earth-shattering losses of loved ones in death. The latter are powerful tearjerkers, while the former often seemed a bit trivial in comparison. All in all, it's a worthwhile read if you need a reminder that humans can be kind and loving, and relationships can be worth the effort.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the digital ARC!