One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024 • One of Publisher's Weekly's 10 Promising Fiction Debuts of Spring 2024
“Beautiful Days is one of the year’s best debuts. . .a glorious creepfest reminiscent of speculative collections by Carmen Maria Machado, Mariana Enríquez and other children of Lovecraft....Williams sees beyond newspaper headlines to a world cleaved apart by forces we’ve unleashed, blinkered by arrogance and greed. . .Beautiful Days is the spear tip of his potential. This writer’s got talent to burn.” —Hamilton Cain, The Washington Post
“At least once every year, a debut short-story collection comes along and gets under my skin. . . In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days. . .a subtle and speculative barn-burner that fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour.” —Esquire
“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
“Remarkable. . . Revelatory. . . Williams's tales deserve favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders.” —Publishers Weekly *starred review*
“There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. . .His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, with a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.” —BookPage *starred review*
“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] 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
“Provocative.” —Booklist
2024-04-19
A clutch of eerie domestic tales, infused with contemporary paranoia.
Most of the stories in Williams’ bracing debut are narrated by mild-mannered men witnessing the world shift and warp around them. In “Trial Run,” a man finds a co-worker sunk in antisemitic conspiracy-mongering about the boss. In “A New Toe,” a father finds that his infant son has sprung exactly that. An especially effective (and hallucinatory) story, “Lucca Castle,” takes its narrator from gentle anxiety over the well-being of his daughter to odd coincidences involving his girlfriend, late wife, and an apocalyptic theorist. Much like George Saunders, Williams develops setups rooted in equal parts absurdity and peril: “Return to Crashaw” is narrated by a tour guide at a peculiar desert site filled with megaliths of unknown origin; “Wood Sorrel House” and “Ghost Image” both turn on fathers whose families fragment in post-apocalyptic scenarios. But unlike Saunders, Williams doesn’t mine his setups for humor, cultivating a horror story vibe. In “Mousetraps,” a man’s hunt for a humane trap takes him into the depths of a hardware store, a mazelike symbol for humanity’s own constrictions, and “Red Light” takes what should be an erotic kinky online hookup and makes it a minefield of uncertainty. Some stories, like “Ghost Image,” push narrative cohesion to the breaking point, recalling Barthelme at his most out-there. But throughout, Williams is determined to metaphorically work through the fear and feelings of disassociation from modern life. We’re much like the narrator of “Golf Cart,” who in the middle of the night is summoned by his brother to confront some unnamed and unseen dangers: As the story intensifies, the narrator’s brother muses, “There’s no way life is real." Williams persuades you that the guy might have a point.
Lyrical, well-crafted, offbeat yarns.
