Can you manage to read at the beach? A summertime choose your own adventure.

Many pitfalls and impediments lay between you and a day of enjoying your book in peace. Can you manage to get past everything arrayed against you? Choose wisely!

---

Your phone buzzes. A text: “Hey we’re all headed out to the beach this Saturday. You should come!”

Even though you’re a bit of a beach hater — you don’t like the sun and it doesn’t like you — a day on the shore sounds like a nice chance to relax. What better place to get some uninterrupted time with a book than the beach?

---

You stuff your biggest tote bag to the brim with all the beach gear you’re gonna need: towel, sunscreen, second sunscreen for your face, hat, water bottle, umbrella, the weird little folding camping chair that may or may not work.

The bag’s getting pretty full… Is there even room for a book?

No — It just won’t fit. You leave your book on your bedside table, staring at you. It won a Man Booker, but you couldn’t manage to bring ‘er. Turn to the last page.

Yes — After a few tries that fold the cover in half and almost rip a few pages, you manage to stuff your book in between warming cans of seltzer and a bag of pretzels being pummeled into dust. Continue on.

---

You don’t manage to read at all on the ride to the beach: you’re too busy chatting and trying to keep your bag from bursting open. You dash across the parking lot and the sand, spread the towels and blankets, snap the chairs open, and get settled in.

You see your book peeking out from your bag: almost time! But first, sunscreen. Do you ask a friend to help you out with the application?

Yes — They do a great job. You’re protected from the rays, and it’s time to get reading! Continue on.

No — Everything goes well until you try to get to the hard-to-reach places. It’s physically impossible to apply sunscreen to your own back (science has proved it), but you try anyway. You attempt to squirt sunscreen down your back, but end up sending a stream of ‘screen straight into your bag. Your book is unreadably soaked. But at least now it won’t get sunburned. Turn to last page.

---

Your little folding chair seems to be holding, and you pull out your book. It’s only slightly damp due to the condensation of the cans it’s been nestled against.

“Volleyball, anyone?” Your friend is holding out a tangle of poles and netting in your direction. Should you play?

Yes — The task of getting the net untangled makes you feel like you’re untwisting a ball of Christmas lights or you’re a tuna caught in a trawler’s nets. After 45 minutes, the net is finally set up. You bat the ball around for a bit. Continue to lunch.

No — You can’t be distracted by athletics. Continue on.

---

You settle back on your towel, trying to prop yourself up on one arm and open your book with your other arm in a way that won’t cut off circulation to your hands. While trying to maneuver your body into a comfortable reading position, you make eye contact with your friend’s four-year-old, holding a bucket and a little shovel out to you.

Should you help out with a sand castle?

No — You have no time to be Frank Lloyd Babysitter. Continue on.

Yes — You’re no architect, but you do remember that the sand needs to be the right wetness to hold shape. You and the four-year-old start building an impressive complex of castles, some with an imposing Romanesque massiveness and others with a Gaudi-inspired natural undulation. You’re really getting into this, and the kid hands you the shovel.

“Don’t worry, there’s another,” the child assures you as they toddle off.

You keep working, making sure the entryway has the right balance between grandeur and openness. You want this place to be welcoming and inspiring, for your sea citizens.

“Should the moat be deeper?” You look over and see the kid has dug a pretty deep hole— using your book as a shovel.

The sand and seawater have swollen and bent your book into an unrecognizable blob. You suddenly understand Godzilla’s urge to smash a beautiful city. Turn to the last page.

---

*
It’s lunchtime! You haven’t managed to open your book to read yet, but you set it aside and accept a sandwich that has been sweating in a cooler for a few hours. It’s as damp as it is lukewarm.

After lunch, you’re starting to feel a little hot. Should you take a dip in the ocean to cool off?

No — There’s no time! You’ve almost cracked your book, don’t lose focus! Continue on.

Yes — The swim is refreshing, and you walk back to your towel and feel the pleasant coolness of the breeze. But you see a blur of activity near your bag…

Seagulls. Dozens of them.

---

They’ve torn open your bag of pulverized pretzels and are thrashing your tote! Do you intervene?

No — The gulls have already won. Let them have your book, your phone, your wallet. Maybe they’ll make better use of them than you have. You sit down in the sand and watch the ocean, contemplating how you are just another speck of sand compared to the awesome power of nature and her gulls. Turn to the last page.

Yes — You sprint over and shoo away the gulls, just in time. Your book only has a little bit of bird poop and feathers on it, and your phone is only partially submerged in sand. The pretzels have been ground to dust, returned to the flour from whence they came. Continue on.

---

You settle on your towel with your bent, sunscreen-greased, seagull-mauled book. You adjust your hat and umbrella so the sun is out of your eyes, and settle into the beach chair. Opening your book, you scan the page for where you left off—

“Whatcha reading?” One of your fellow sand-fans is standing over you, pointing to your book. Do you reply?

Yes — You reply to the question, explaining how you came to this book, what you make of the author, and what you think of it so far. Your friend nods vigorously — did you see what the author posted on Instagram about the Met Gala? Soon, you’ve put your book back in your bag, taken out your phone, and are showing each other the greatest hits from your collections of literary gossip screenshots.

The sun starts to set. You shove your book back in your bag — it’s easier now that the birds made room by eating your pretzels.

Maybe you’ll have time to read when you’re back home, when opening your book will scatter three-quarters of a cup of sand all over your bed? Turn to the last page.

No — You don’t say anything, you just turn the book cover to show your interrogator.

“Oh I think I heard of that one,” and they turn back around.

At long last, it’s just you and your book… Continue on.

---

Congratulations! You read your book at the beach! You only manage to get through a couple of pages before it’s time to pack up and leave, but it won’t stop you from calling this book “the perfect beach read!” You did it!

---

*
Whoops! You failed to read a single page at the beach. Every teacher who you impressed by reading above grade level as a child is disappointed in you. Enjoy your “fun” in “the sun.”

Here are the literary adaptations to look out for at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Since the 1930s, the annual Cannes international film festival has been a glamorous hub for new cinema. (And, according to an audacious claim on its website: the world’s “most widely publicized cultural event.”) While the festival’s carefully cultivated position at the apex of High Culture masks what I imagine are brutal behind-the-scenes distribution battles happening nightly in Provençal’s shadiest back-rooms, movie nuts may look to Cannes for some of the most exciting international, indie, and auteur cinema offerings.

And as the frantic book-to-screen adaptation trend continues apace, many of those offerings are adapted from books. Here’s a glance at some of the exciting literary fare to be found at this year’s festival, which is currently running through May 25.

September Says

An adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s smash hit gothic novel Sisters, September Says follows a combustible trio of two sisters (July and September) and their mother (Sheela) over a fraught holiday in Ireland. The first feature film written and directed by the actor Ariane Labed (wife and long-time collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos), this one promises to shimmer with strangeness. Although it has not secured distribution yet, my fingers are crossed.

On its release in 2020, the novel Sisters was praised as a thrilling, macabre mystery, nuanced in its exploration of codependency. You can read an excerpt of the novel here.

La Plus Précieuse des Marchandises (The Most Precious of Cargoes)

This animated drama from the French auteur Michel Hazanavicius—who may be best known stateside as the heart behind 2011’s homage-to-silent film, The Artist—is adapted from a novel of the same name. This allegorical fairy tale by author Jean-Claude Grumberg is set during the Holocaust, and follows a woman living in the Polish woods who adopts an orphaned child. The novel was published in the States in 2020 via HarperVia, and translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

The film adaptation, which Grumberg and Hazanavicius adapted together, is already generating buzz for its poignant treatment of tragedy, and the beautiful hand-drawn art.

Long Live the King!

Oh, Canada

Paul Schrader is back in action with this highly-anticipated new film about a leftie documentarian with a dark secret. Our protagonist Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is lifted from the pages of Russell Banks’ 2021 novel Foregone, which author Adam Haslett praised in  Times’ Book Review. As a confessional reckoning infused with “a working-class New England existentialism,” this piece sounds like something well within Gere’s wheelhouse. Especially considering his cast co-conspirators include pleasure- to-have-in-class like Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi(!), and Michael Imperioli.

A prolific author of more than twenty books (including the Pulitzer Prize-finalist, Continental Drift), Banks died in January 2023.

Can you believe this is Ben Whishaw?!

Limonov: The Ballad

This profile of “a revolutionary militant, a thug, an underground writer, a butler to a millionaire in Manhattan…a switchblade-waving poet, a lover of beautiful women, a warmonger, a political agitator, and a novelist,” Eduard Limonov, stars an extra-dapper Ben Whishaw. Adapted by the Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov from a “most peculiar” cult classic by Emmanuel Carrère, this jaunty, raunchy, highly-editorialized biography has piqued my interest.

Consider the novel’s title alone: Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia.

What’s he BUILDING in there…

Megalopolis 

Francis Ford Coppola’s opus features nods to David Graeber and Herman Hesse. But we’ve covered that elsewhere.

I’m curious about this year’s Cannes, whose jury is helmed by none other than Head Barbie in chief (and famous literary adaptor to screen), Greta Gerwig. Not least because the festival has championed some of my favorite films—like Paris, Texas, The Piano, and Parasite. And of course, the all-time Palme d’or winner: Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz.

Those films were all original screenplays, far as I know. But that’s a whole other quibble. In the meantime, my hopes stay high.

Images Via, Via, Via

One great short story to read today:
Sarah Gailey’s “The Daily Commute”

According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the second year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:

“The Daily Commute” by Sarah Gailey

When The Sunday Morning Transport launched in 2022, I was both excited and exhausted. A new speculative lit mag is always welcome, but a Substack—meaning another email in my inbox? Turns out TSMT is one of the few regular emails I don’t mind receiving: their editorial curation delivers a fabulous mix of storytellers new and old, known and lesser-known. Turns out they’re perfect for reading over a slow morning’s cup of tea—give Sarah Gailey’s charming story about public transit delays a shot and you’ll see what I mean.

The story begins:

The bus is slowing down and the apiarist doesn’t seem to care at all.

This is a problem for us. We have to get to work and to school and to our appointments. But the apiarist doesn’t care about that. They don’t care about anything but the bees and the bus. It’s infuriating. We are infuriated.

Read it here.

*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).

King Charles’ new royal portrait as Romantasy covers.

If you’re anything like us, you took one look at King Charles’ new royal portrait and thought, “This looks like cover art for a Romantasy book.” The red-washed painting is perfect for a book about a lonely king falling in love with an elvish wizard, or a prince that gets turned into a butterfly by a witch and has to move in with his dad, or a simple love story between an aging general and a sentient blob of raspberry jelly.

I think there are some bestsellers here! My advice to the royal family is to jump on this book trend and get these written and off to the printer ASAP.

 

Expand your mind with a new magazine of psychedelic art and literature.

Are you ready to take a trip?

Elastic, a biannual print magazine of psychedelic art and literature that will debut in spring 2025, aims to publish art and writing that’s “immersive, dreamlike, daring, genre- and time-bending, and that acts to expand the mind and the vast possibilities of narrative.”

Founding editor-in-chief Hillary Brenhouse was previously the editorial director of Bold Type Books and editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine. She’ll be joined by editor Meara Sharma, formerly the editor-in-chief of Adi magazine, and a body of contributing editors and artists that includes Jaquira Diaz, Amanda Gunn, Laura van den Berg, Jia Sung, Amber Sparks, and Darian Longmire. The magazine is being supported in part by grants from UC Berkeley and Harvard as part of their Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative.

“The first psychedelic era was a time of radical artistic innovation,” Brenhouse says. “And yet, in the popular imagination, ‘psychedelia’ refers to little more than neon mandalas and jam-band music. Elastic is interested in work that locates the sublime in the ordinary, that interrogates power by breaking form, and that extends the boundaries of the usual creative containers. We’re also interested in countering the prevalent idea that the only authors of psychedelic culture have been the same few white men.”

In addition to publishing contemporary work, the magazine will pay tribute to an overlooked archive of psychedelic art and literature, much of which was made by Black artists and thinkers, as cultural critic Emily Lordi points out in “The Radical Experimentation of Black Psychedelia.” Elastic seeks to recognize and revisit the artists at the leading edge of, in Lordi’s words, “one of the most lasting and influential artistic movements of the twentieth century.”

It all sounds trippy and terrific; I can’t wait for the first issue.