Beach Reads

**Beach Reads will be shipped September 1**

As you sweat-addled readers know, the term ‘beach read’—the escapist romance, thriller, mystery paperback page-turners fit for vacations—is sometimes taken to have a pejorative connotation. Many writers have tried to distance themselves from the term because of its association with pulp novels and “chick lit” by misogynist and snobbish detractors. Sometimes, people speak of Colleen Hoover-style novels as if this is anything new, but there have always been mass-market books you pick up randomly for pleasure, and there always will be. Sometimes we need an uncomplicated pleasure.

The differentiation between highbrow and lowbrow itself has become tedious. Maybe it always has been.