Zach Williams

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Beautiful Days

It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

A powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection that singles Zach Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction... Like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike, you can sense tension lurking in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of his worlds... Precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, with a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson

In this eerie debut, Williams explores how easily the unknown can enter our everyday lives and change us. His work, which often teeters on the border between reality and the uncanny, asks more questions than it answers

[An] accomplished collection. . . Raw and off-kilter but studded with moments of transcendent beauty. With a first book this fantastic, Williams is a writer to watch

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'

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

Bracing, eerie, infused with contemporary paranoia... Zach Williams is determined to work through the fear and feelings of disassociation from modern life, rooted in equal parts absurdity and peril

Jeffrey Eugenides, author of 'The Virgin Suicides'

Eerie, unsettling, and beautiful. You can’t 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 you’ve 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'

One of 2024’s superlative debuts, a glorious creepfest reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado and Mariana Enríquez... Williams’s characters grapple with grief and foreboding... [his] technique is subtle but strikes with a bullwhip’s torque... As close to transcendence as it gets, Beautiful Days is the spear tip of Zach Williams' potential. This writer’s got talent to burn

This daring debut book ventures to lift the folds of reality and probe the depths of the surreal, the menacing, and the absurd. The understated precision of Zach Williams’ prose allows these stories to exist in a captivating liminal realm, hovering between a dream and a nightmare

Electric Lit, 'Best short story collections of 2024'

Startling, reality-bending, revelatory... The longer we sit with these stories, the more they reveal. Zach Williams delves deep to enlighten readers about the absurdities and banalities of our collective existence

In this eerie debut story collection, Williams explores how easily the unknown can enter our everyday lives and change us . . .

Beautiful Days

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Zach Williams

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