Beautiful Days
Stories
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024
2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
“A bright new voice in fiction…A genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches…Like Gabriel García Márquez and Stephen King…we might be staring before long at [the] 'Selected Stories of Zach Williams.'”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“One of the year’s best debuts…this writer’s got talent to burn.”
—The Washington Post
“Remarkable...Revelatory...Williams’s tales deserve favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A remarkable collection.”
—Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author of James
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams's remarkable debut collection explores grief and masculinity in stories that hint at their characters' strange afterlives. The recently divorced narrator of "Trial Run" trudges into the office during a snowstorm, where he's unhappily shut in with a conspiracy theorist security guard and a toxic coworker. The narrator has no love for either man, but by the story's revelatory ending, he has turned his unforgiving gaze on himself. In "Red Light," an oddball and increasingly tense tale, a man named Parker grows curious about the boyfriend of the woman he's having sex with, who's watching Parker and the woman while hiding in a closet. "Lucca Castle," "Ghost Image," and "Return to Crashaw" each follow a different man's stumbling attempt to forge a new life after his wife's death. Their respective settings—a yacht headquartering an anti-capitalist cult off the coast of Queens, N.Y., a bombed-out Disney World, and a sandstone monument that attracts UFO obsessives—are rendered in an unsettling and deeply captivating dream logic, hinting at the possibility that the narrators are already dead (the narrator of "Ghost Image," who spots a "Hell Is Real" billboard while driving across the country, wonders if he's "entered hell... the hell of earthbound ghosts that repeat the same actions, haunt the same spaces"). Williams's tales deserve favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders.
