Beautiful Days

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 *
Nothing thrills a book reviewer more than a debut book so electrifying, so original, such an auspicious announcement of a major talent, that it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. I am delighted to say that Zach Williams’s story collection is such a debut … Influences from Shirley Jackson to Donald Barthelme, video games to George Saunders, are readily apparent, and yet Williams’s fiction always feels bracingly distinctive … Profound and moving, a set of stories that burn with curiosity and blaze with feeling * Boston Globe *
Impressive, evocative psychological horror… Small surrealisms fleck the storytelling [and] the details are spot on… [Zach Williams is] a genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches… [He] pushes you slowly off into the night * The New York Times *
A pensive, artfully of-the-moment short story collection in which danger and farce tussle for dominance… Expect offbeat lyricism, dreamlike paranoia and more than a hint of horror * Guardian *
[A] dreamlike – or, rather, nightmarish – debut, brimming with the intensity of Stephen King or David Lynch, and tight but lyrical prose that is wholly original * New York Times Book Review *
It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. But Beautiful Days makes the case for a new adage: strange fiction can help us tell the truth… The entire collection is varied, yet focused; serious, yet throw-your-head-back funny; virtuosic in the way of a writer who will be around for a long time… It calls to mind Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Jennifer Egan. Like these writers, Williams uses his strange and scary premises to reveal the persistent humanity of his characters * Chicago Review of Books *
Zach Williams is a brilliant, singular, 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’
Unsettling and deeply captivating… A remarkable debut collection [which] explores grief and masculinity in stories that hint at their characters’ strange afterlives… Beautiful Days deserves favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *
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’
Williams’s short-story collection is one of the year’s superlative debuts, a glorious creepfest teeming with friends and foes, natural and supernatural * The Washington Post, ‘50 notable works of fiction from 2024’ *

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.

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