
Beautiful Days
Stories
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Narrated by:
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Dan Bittner
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By:
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Zach Williams
About this listen
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Lit
A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.
These ten stories show the fallibility of time and how reality reveals itself behind the gauze of a dream—or a nightmare. Throughout, Williams illustrates how quickly we come to the edges of our patience and endurance, the hidden damages lurking in the shadows of the everyday, the distances we must travel to protect our families, and the tenuousness of even our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares listeners to confront the power—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.
With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.
©2024 Zach Williams (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024
One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024 • One of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2024 • One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year • One of Publisher's Weekly's 10 Promising Fiction Debuts of Spring 2024 • One of Electric Lit's Best Short Story Collections of the Year
"A bright new voice in fiction…A genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches…Like Gabriel García Márquez and Stephen King, Williams understands how unnervingly intense and unknowable children can be. Like J.G. Ballard, he savors postapocalyptic vistas. But Williams is his own writer…He pushes you slowly off into the night, then down long embankments…we might be staring before long at [the] 'Selected Stories of Zach Williams.'"—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“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
"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, Beautiful Days, is such a debut… The stories’ subjects seem to have bubbled up from a fertile, teeming, uninhibited subconscious, and yet the prose is precise, musical, and exquisitely calibrated for maximum effect.”—The Boston Globe
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- By: Caroline Overington
- Narrated by: Anna Skellern
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Original Recording
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Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.
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Seriously, that was the ending?
- By alicia in athens on 02-13-25
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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He Who Fights with Monsters 2
- A LitRPG Adventure (He Who Fights with Monsters, Book 2)
- By: Shirtaloon, Travis Deverell
- Narrated by: Heath Miller
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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But Jason Asano is settling into his new life. Now, a contest draws young elites to the city of Greenstone to compete for a grand prize. Jason must gather a band of companions if he is to stand a chance against the best the world has to offer. While the young adventurers are caught up in competition, the city leaders deal with revelations of betrayal as a vast and terrible enemy is revealed. Although Jason seems uninvolved, he has unknowingly crossed the enemy’s path before.
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Contrary to common reviews
- By Karen on 05-21-21
By: Shirtaloon, and others
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Brain Damage
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
As Charly struggles to recover from her brain injury, she begins to realize that the events of that fateful night are trapped in the damaged right side of her brain. Now, she must put the jigsaw pieces together to discover the identity of the man who tried to kill her...before he finishes the job he started.
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Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
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The Pearl and the Onion
- By: Brittany K. Allen
- Narrated by: Anna Chlumsky, Jasmine Cephas-Jones
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Original Recording
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When our story begins, Julia Child is an eager but inexperienced codebreaker longing to prove herself in the male-dominated world of intelligence, and Josephine Baker is, well, Josephine Baker—a world-famous entertainer who is now leading a double life as a spy for the French Resistance. When a golden opportunity arises to infiltrate a high-stakes Nazi gala in Vichy France, Julia must put aside her by-the-book mentality to assist her unorthodox new partner.
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Very enjoyable story
- By C. Wilson on 03-23-25
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The House on the Water
- A Novella
- By: Margot Hunt
- Narrated by: Taylor Schilling
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Original Recording
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Story
Every year, Caroline Reed takes a trip with her best friend, Esme Lamont. They’re usually accompanied by their spouses - but this year, everything’s changed. Esme has just gone through a bitter divorce, and Caroline's wondering if her own marriage is reaching its breaking point as she and her husband, John, cope with the discovery that their son has been abusing drugs. Still, the inseparable duo books a weeklong stay at a beach-front home in Shoreham, Florida, inviting Esme’s brother, Nick, and his new husband. After a blissful first night in the vacation home, tragedy strikes.
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Wonderful Story
- By David M. Wilcox on 12-04-20
By: Margot Hunt
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Mary Jane
- By: Amy Herzog
- Narrated by: Rachel McAdams, April Matthis, Brenda Wehle, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 16 mins
- Original Recording
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Performance
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Academy Award nominee Rachel McAdams stars in Mary Jane, a poignant and intimate drama following a single mother’s journey caring for her chronically ill young son. Set in New York City, the play unfolds in two parts—Mary Jane's small Queens apartment and a pediatric hospital. With unflinching honesty and unexpected humor, we witness Mary Jane's tireless devotion, her interactions with medical professionals, and her struggle to maintain her sense of self.
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Amazing performance
- By Andrew Reynolds on 12-28-24
By: Amy Herzog
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I couldn't finish it
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Award-winning author Melina Marchetta reopens the story of the group of friends from her acclaimed novel Saving Francesca - but five years have passed, and now it's Thomas Mackee who needs saving. After his favorite uncle was blown to bits on his way to work in a foreign city, Tom watched his family implode. He quit school and turned his back on his music and everyone that mattered, including the girl he can't forget. Shooting for oblivion, he's hit rock bottom, forced to live with his single, pregnant aunt; work at the Union pub with his former friends; and reckon with his grieving, alcoholic father.
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4.5 Stars!
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Plucked from his small fishing village and captured by the conquistadors looking to plunder the gold of Peru, young Waman is the everyman thrown into extraordinary circumstances, caught up in history's throes. He finds himself at every major moment in the empire building of the Spanish explorers, including Francisco Pizarro, and in the culture clash and violent overthrow of the Incan leaders.
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Strangers from a Different Shore
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Eye opening to the way immigrants are treated
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She And Allan
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Overall
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Performance
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She and Allan is a novel by H. Rider Haggard, first published in 1921. It brought together his two most popular characters, Ayesha from She (to which it serves as a prequel), and Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines. Its significance was recognized by its republication by the Newcastle Publishing Company as the sixth volume of the celebrated Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library series in September 1975.
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Best of the Trilogy
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The Ministry of Time
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In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
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More than the sum of its parts but…
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By: Kaliane Bradley
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When the Clock Broke
- Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
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With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today. In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents.
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Amazing history of the early 90s
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There's Always This Year
- On Basketball and Ascension
- By: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling.
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Love and Basketball
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By: Hanif Abdurraqib
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Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth.
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I did not enjoy this
- By MarcB on 09-17-24
By: Dinaw Mengestu
What listeners say about Beautiful Days
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Jeffrey A Horler
- 12-15-24
Needs more edge
The second story -- "Wood Sorrel House" -- is fantastic with a very unique premise that does not fit inside any genre. From there, the stories mostly missed the "dark turns" promised by the rave review in the NY Times and left me disengaged with the characters.
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