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Zach Williams
New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams visits Seattle to celebrate the release of his striking and savage debut story collection. Beautiful Days confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises.
In each of the ten revelatory stories in Beautiful Days, reality is witnessed through the gauzy folds of a dream—or a nightmare: A couple awakens in a remote cabin in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their infant remains unchanged in their time loop. A Manhattan private equity partner, after the sudden death of his wife, falls in with a group of anarchists plotting to accelerate societal collapse through occult spell-casting rituals from a yacht anchored in Jamaica Bay. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging Jeep tour guide leads a troublesome group to the site of an anomalous, scientifically inexplicable set of megaliths, witnessing the slow social deterioration as the rules of decorum go out the window.
With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of the human condition and refuses to let us look away. Williams depicts the divided self of the parent; the fallout of our deepest relationships; the loneliness that stems from the search for meaning; and the hope that such a vital source of meaning even exists. Keenly aware of the insidiousness lurking in the shadows of the quotidian and the perversity in the mundane, Williams dares readers to recognize the impact—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.
Zach Williams is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. His story "Trial Run" was one of three that won The Paris Review's 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, he currently resides with his family in San Francisco.
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