The Invention of the Beach Read

“Books for Idle Hours,” a new history by the academic Donna Harrington-Lueker, unpacks both the constructedness of “summer reading” and its gravitational pull. But the book industry seized the chance to rebrand summer novels as “an acceptable middle-class pleasure,” Harrington-Lueker writes. “Books for Idle Hours” is especially interesting on the emergence of a new type of textual diversion: the American summer novel.

Source: www.newyorker.com