Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons Available to Purchase

As any beachcomber knows, the beach is where objects that would never otherwise keep company with each other find a common resting place. The hollowed-out shells of crabs and clams dropped by gulls to crack them open are interspersed with the browns and greens of washed-up kelp, as well as with the bright saturated colors of the plastics that are a ubiquitous sign that humans have passed through, and all this against sand, a marker of the passage of the time it took to erode a wide range of material—rocks, shells, parrotfish dejecta—down to the grains beneath our feet. Modernism at the Beach is a book that takes its subject as method: it invites its readers to approach its varied objects—Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Rachel Carson, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, performance art informed by climate catastrophe—as intellectual beachcombers taking in an unexpected, improvised arrangement, able to appreciate the way these...