Beach Reading

**A genre-bending exploration of “beach reading” – the genre, the activity, and the artists behind it all shaping our understanding of vacation at the beach. Traces the literary and cultural history of the “beach read” genre, and how these coastal vacation reads shaped the beaches we love.** From Kate Chopin’s The Awakening to Elin Hildenbrand’s modern empire of beach read classics, Beach Reading explores the evolution of a genre we love to hate (and sometimes hate to love). Blending memoir, archival research, and literary and cultural analysis, Sari Edelstein traces how the shoreline became a site of freedom, pleasure, and possibility. The rise of the “beach read” has had an enormous, generally unacknowledged, cultural impact that shapes our ideas about what it means to relax, what love and adventure should feel like, what we should do with our leisure time, and where we can find all of those things. The artists writing at the beach, about the beach, or for the beach, so often women, are dismissed as unserious. “Beach reads,” as a genre, are likewise ignored by critics. But this habit of ignoring popular masterworks risks misunderstanding their enormous cultural impact. Edelstein backs up, offering a corrective survey of art at the beach and for the beach designed to honor the books we bring on vacation. From Victorian bathing machines and Black-owned seaside resorts to queer sanctuaries like Provincetown to the rise of the modern “beach read,” Beach Reading shows how women have shaped the beach and, in turn, how the beach has shaped them. An overdue celebration of reading and writing at the beach, Sari Edelstein offers warm, inviting prose as she unpacks the cultural importance of this supremely underrated genre—showing us that fun books are meaningful and important, too.