Description

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From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises.

A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.

These ten stories show the fallibility of time and how reality reveals itself behind the gauze of a dream—or a nightmare. Throughout, Williams illustrates how quickly we come to the edges of our patience and endurance, the hidden damages lurking in the shadows of the everyday, the distances we must travel to protect our families, and the tenuousness of even our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to confront the power—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.

With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.

About the Author

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ZACH WILLIAMS is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. His story "Trial Run" was one of three that won The Paris Review a 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, he currently resides with his family in San Francisco.

Praise For…

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One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024 • One of Publisher's Weekly's 10 Promising Fiction Debuts of Spring 2024

"Zach Williams is a brilliant, singular, deep, and deeply entertaining writer. You will continue to think about and feel these stories long after you have finished reading them. They will change you." —Jonathan Safran Foer, New York Times bestseller and author of Here I Am

"Beautiful Days is a remarkable collection. These stories are full of irony and absurdity, but are never sleight, glib or waggish. Zach Williams paints us into every story with quick, deft strokes and then unfolds, with a scarily confident hand, the rest of the canvas, full of surprises and truths and stuff we never imagined." —Percival Everett, Booker Prize finalist and author of James

"A brilliant debut." —Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Marriage Plot

"Beautiful Days brings a reader though strange and grounded lands on just the other side of reality. You will come through changed, shaken, thoughtful, and totally amazed." —Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book

"[Zach Williams's] beautiful, disquieting stories are profound in the true meaning of that word—they go deep. He's a major talent...an exciting debut." —Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears, Red Pill and Blue Ruin

“Beautiful Days contains elegant mysteries, and the book stays in the mind long after you've read it.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Sun Collective

“The visionary weirdness of these stories feels hauntingly attuned to our time.” —Elizabeth Tallent, author of Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism

“Wide-eyed on the world and its often mystical ways, there’s a sparkle of magic and mystery in every elegant sentence of these wondrously curious, unsettling, and absolutely original stories. I devoured them with pure delight—and with awe for this writer’s singular imagination and talent." —Chang-rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad

“[A] sense of bizarro claustrophobia informs the stories in Williams’s debut collection.” —Publishers Weekly, *Most Anticipated Debut Fiction*

“[A] bracing debut. . . Much like George Saunders, Williams develops setups rooted in equal parts absurdity and peril. . . determined to metaphorically work through the fear and feelings of disassociation from modern life. . . Lyrical, well-crafted, offbeat yarns.”
—Kirkus Reviews