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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg
A hilarious, thoughtful, and in-depth exploration of the pleasures and perils of modern romance from Aziz Ansari, the star of Master of None and one of this generation's sharpest comedic voices.
At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it's wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. So why are so many people frustrated?
Some of our problems are unique to our time. "Why did this guy just text me an emoji of a pizza?" "Should I go out with this girl even though she listed Combos as one of her favorite snack foods? Combos?!" "My girlfriend just got a message from some dude named Nathan. Who's Nathan? Did he just send her a photo of his penis? Should I check just to be sure?"
But the transformation of our romantic lives can't be explained by technology alone. In a short period of time, the whole culture of finding love has changed dramatically. A few decades ago, people would find a decent person who lived in their neighborhood. Their families would meet and, after deciding neither party seemed like a murderer, they would get married and soon have a kid, all by the time they were twenty-four. Today, people marry later than ever and spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.
For years, Aziz Ansari has been aiming his comic insight at modern romance, but for Modern Romance, the book, he decided he needed to take things to another level. He teamed up with NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg and designed a massive research project, including hundreds of interviews and focus groups conducted everywhere from Tokyo to Buenos Aires to Wichita. They analyzed behavioral data and surveys and created their own online research forum on Reddit, which drew thousands of messages. They enlisted the world's leading social scientists, including Andrew Cherlin, Eli Finkel, Helen Fisher, Sheena Iyengar, Barry Schwartz, Sherry Turkle, and Robb Willer. The result is unlike any social science or humor book we've seen before.
In Modern Romance, Ansari combines his irreverent humor with cutting-edge social science to give us an unforgettable tour of our new romantic world.
"The ever hip and funny comedian and Parks and Recreation star embarks on a surprisingly insightful exploration of the complex realities of dating today ... . Ansari's eminently readable book is successful, in part, because it not only lays out the history, evolution, and pitfalls of dating, it also offers sound advice on how to actually win today's constantly shifting game of love. Often hilarious, consistently informative, and unusually helpful." —Kirkus Reviews
"Ansari, a comedian and TV actor, has co-written a book with a legitimate sociologist about what it means to date in the modern era. When technology and instant gratification are changing the landscape of human interactions, dating is weirder than ever, and I'm looking forward to Ansari's sense of humor and cultural criticism on the topic, which he's started to address in his stand-up." —Publishers Weekly
"Always-hilarious Aziz Ansari proves you can be smart and funny at the same time. Not only did I laugh my ass off, I really learned stuff. Where was this book when I was 22 years old?" —Steven Levitt, coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestselling Freakonomics
"Laughing is my second least-favorite thing in the world after thinking. This book was torture. Not a page passed without an unwanted eruption of giggles or insight. Aziz is funny as hell, and smart as shit." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals
This information about Modern Romance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Aziz Ansari is a writer, stand-up comedian, and actor. He currently stars in, writes, and directs his own original series for Netflix--Master of None--winner of the 2016 Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Comedy Series. Ansari is also the winner of a 2016 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. In 2014, Ansari became the seventh comedian ever to sell out Madison Square Garden in New York. His two sold-out performances at the legendary arena were filmed for his fourth comedy special, "Aziz Ansari: Live at Madison Square Garden," which was released in March of 2015 on Netflix. For seven seasons, he starred as Tom Haverford on the beloved NBC comedy series Parks and Recreation with Amy Poehler and other great people. He has also appeared in several films including This Is the End, Funny People, and 30 Minutes or Less. He enjoys eating fresh pasta and watching multiple hours of critically acclaimed television dramas in one sitting.
Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology at NYU. He's the author of Going Solo (Penguin Press) and has contributed to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.
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