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''A brilliant debut'' Jeffrey Eugenides
''Beautiful, disquieting, profound in the true meaning of that word '' Hari Kunzru
''These stories will change you'' Jonathan Safran Foer
A young family is trapped in a time loop in an idyllic holiday cabin. A middle-aged man becomes convinced that his disappointing son is an impostor. Two brothers take a midnight ride in a golf cart and run into trouble. The elderly tour guide at an alien contact site loses control of his guests. Meanwhile, all around them, America is dissolving, fragmenting, distorting beyond recognition.
The antiheroes of Beautiful Days are chronic underachievers, lost in their own lives and plagued by loneliness, self-doubt, suppressed rage. They gaze upon the world with both wonder and horror, witnessing reality as if through the gauzy folds of a dream (or a nightmare), longing for transcendence or salvation. They tune in to the faint buzz of anxiety which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. They recognise the perversity in the mundane; they reckon with the terrifying beauty of time''s relentless movement. And when the worst happens, they take to the road - criss-crossing the wilderness in stolen cars, riding trains to the end of the line, or cruising along ruined monorails as the skyline burns.
Zach Williams'' stories are haunted by the ghosts of America - its lost illusions, its dark aspirations, its boundless, disquieting potential. They leak through the fabric of reality and out into the void beyond. And they reach, ever-hopeful, toward a moment of connection that might pull a body back from the brink.<>
About the author
Zach Williams was born in Wilmington, Delaware. He holds an MFA from New York University, where his thesis adviser was Zadie Smith, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University 2021-2023. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review and McSweeney's. Before becoming a writer, he spent over a decade as a high school English teacher. Zach Williams lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two young children.
Report
Uncanny, subtle and spectacular. Once every year, a debut collection comes along and gets under my skin... In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days. Fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour [these stories] about the horrors of encountering something completely unknowable in the course of everyday life, whether it's the mind-warping experience of parenthood or the echo-chamber effect of the internet and social media Esquire
