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Hamish Hamilton signs 'haunting' debut from Williams
Hamish Hamilton has bought a debut story collection, Beautiful Days from “brilliant new talent” American writer Zach Williams
The collection features “uncanny fiction, with elements of horror and speculative fiction, meditating on the psychological collapse of modern America”. Editorial director Hermione Thompson bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Fiona Baird at WME, on behalf of Claudia Ballard, and will publish in trade paperback and e-book editions in July 2024. American rights previously sold to Doubleday; rights were also sold to Italy (Orville Press / Garzanti) and Germany (DTV).
The blurb reads: “A young family is 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, suppressed rage. 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.”
Hamish Hamilton said: “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.”
Williams commented: “The stories in Beautiful Days were planned and drafted over a period of years during which I worked as a high school teacher and became a father. I wanted to write about characters desperately seeking beauty and meaning against a backdrop of modern American loneliness. I am humbled and absolutely delighted that the book has found a home with Hamish Hamilton.”
Thompson added: “Zach Williams is a writer who knows that the world, like the human heart, is full of beautiful strangeness. His fiction plays out in that beguiling twilight, which presses in from the edges, ever closer, asking us what an ordinary man in modern America might do with or about it. He’s a brilliant new talent who puts me in mind of George Saunders and Mariana Enriquez – I can’t wait to share his stories with readers here.”
Williams is a lecturer in fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and Paris Review among others. His story "Trial Run" won a Paris Review ASME Award for Fiction 2023. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, he now lives in San Francisco.
