Beach Reading

A book lover's celebration of the beach, the beloved literary genre it inspired, and the women writers who made it our favorite place to read As an English professor, Sari Edelstein has long found inspiration in classics like Walden and Moby-Dick. Yet, when beset with her own midlife malaise, she doesn’t reach for stories of men seeking meaning in nature. Instead, Edelstein embarks on a journey to discover how other women have combatted the “damp, drizzly November” of the soul. What she uncovers is a forgotten history of the beach read and of women writers who transformed the seashore into a space of creativity, community, and activism. From Kate Chopin to Elin Hilderbrand, Edelstein follows in the footsteps of the women who reimagined the beach as a place of possibility. Through their books and their lives, they modeled for each other—and future generations—how to inhabit this ever-shifting realm at the border between domesticity and wild nature. In her quest to understand the allure of the beach, Edelstein takes up residence in a Cape Cod dune shack and also visits elite island retreats, historic Black beaches, and queer refuges like Provincetown. Along the way, she considers our fantasies about the natural world and the ethics of our flights of escapism. Blending memoir, archival research, and cultural analysis, this book celebrates "beach reading"—the genre, the activity, and the writers who shaped the coastal imagination.