Blue-green surf, pillowy white sand, and a warm salty breeze-when it comes to restoring body and soul, no place in the world can compete with the beach. And few other places in the world inspire writers to explore, again and again, literature's perennial themes: the rituals of family, the pleasures of friendship, the promise of romance and the trials of love, the immutable cycles of the natural world, the inevitability of loss and death, the unending quest for redemption. Now Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea brings together for the first time the very best of this literary tradition. Comprising short stories, novel excerpts, and narrative non-fiction, Beach will delight every beachgoer looking for the perfect book to tote along to the seashore and every landlocked beach lover dreaming of a visit to the sand and sea. Editors Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker have selected twenty-two unforgettable pieces by a stellar line-up of writers, including short stories by such masters of the genre as Kay Boyle, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Updike; narrative nonfiction by Whitney Balliett, Rachel Carson, and Russ Rymer; and excerpts from Albert Camus's The Stranger , Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother, and John Steinbeck's Cannery Row . The selections in Beach also take us around the world, from the Mediterranean of David Malouf's "A Change of Scene" and J.G. Ballard's "The Largest Theme Park in the World," the South Seas of Diane Johnson's "Great Barrier Reef," a seaside Japanese village in Takeshi Kaiko's "The Duel," and Cape Cod in Ethan Mordden's "I Read My Nephew Stories." "We hope that Beach will inspire in you," write Lencek and Bosker in their introduction, "as it does in us, the depth of feeling and wonder that lies at the very core of the beach experience."