Beautiful Days

(Paperback)

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Description

Thrillingly original and deeply surreal - uncanny stories about manhood and modern America A young family are 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, toxic rage. They gaze on the world with both wonder and horror, longing for transcendence or salvation. They tune in to the faint buzz of anxiety which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. 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, towards a moment of connection that might pull a body back from the brink.

Reviews

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,author of'Everything is Illuminated'
A brilliant debut -- Jeffrey Eugenides, author of'The Virgin Suicides'
Every so often a writer comes along who seems to have access to something not quite rational, some tone or feeling that lies under the surface of things. Zach Williams is such a writer. His beautiful, disquieting stories are profound in the true meaning of that word they go deep. He's a major talent, and this is an exciting debut -- Hari Kunzru, author of 'Red Pill'
A remarkable collection, full of irony and absurdity, but 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, author of 'The Trees'
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'
Eerie, unsettling, and beautiful. You cant predict where the stories will go or who, or what, will be the half-visible presence there. Beautiful Days contains elegant mysteries, and stays in the mind long after youve read it -- Charles Baxter, author of'The Sun Collective'
These stories are elegies for days yet to arrive, which Zach Williams can somehow see coming. His stories are strangely infused with emotions that as yet have no names, because they are only now, in Beautiful Days, finding representation on the page. The visionary weirdness of the stories feels hauntingly attuned to our time. Because I read them headlong, one after the other, it was some time after closing the book before I began to grasp what had happened I was still in them. They are not really short stories at all, but worlds impossible to leave -- Elizabeth Tallent, author of'Scratched'
Bracing, eerie, infused with contemporary paranoia... Zach Williams is determined to work through the fear and feelings of disassociation from modern life... Much like George Saunders, his set-ups [are] rooted in equal parts absurdity and peril * Kirkus *

Author Bio

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.