Approaching the affordances of the YA genre though Reese’s Book Club selections

Since 2016, Hollywood celebrity Reese Witherspoon has become a literary tastemaker in her own right, with her successful online book club enterprise, Reese’s Book Club (RBC). While the club is most well-known for its monthly selection of adult fiction (and sometimes non-fiction), the club has also recently expanded its influence by recommending young adult (YA) titles on a less regular basis. This talk will introduce the phenomenon of celebrity book culture more generally and discuss the affordances of the YA genre through RBC’s selected YA titles, focusing on questions of representation, identity and (biblio)diversity.

Corinna Norrick-Rühl holds the Chair for Book Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her research focuses on twentieth-century mass-market book formats such as paperback series and book club editions as well as contemporary book culture. Key works include Book Clubs and Book Commerce (Cambridge UP, 2019), Are Books Still ‘Different’? (Cambridge UP, 2023, co-authored with Caroline Koegler) and Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic (Palgrave, 2022, co-edited with Shafquat Towheed).