From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor and Wallace Stegner Fellow Zach Williams comes a staggering debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life's broken promises.

Parents awaken in a home in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their infant remains unchanged. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging tour guide leads a troublesome group to the site of a UFO, witnessing the slow social deterioration as the rules of decorum go out the window.

In each of Williams' ten stories, time is as fallible as the characters, and reality is witnessed through the gauzy folds of a dream—or a nightmare. Bucolic scenes devolve into harrowing exercises in abandonment; the quotidian nature of office life raises serious questions of existential fortitude.

Williams is keenly aware of the insidiousness lurking in the shadows of the everyday, ably spiking it with humor. He depicts the divided self of the parent, the distances necessary to protect our children, and the fallout of our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to recognize the impact—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.

From the author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. Danielle Dutton's endlessly inventive books have been praised as "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill), "brilliantly odd" (The Irish Independent), and "beguiling" (The Wall Street Journal).

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, four distinct sections operate like Joseph Cornell boxes, each offering its own vibrant proposal for what contemporary writing might be. "Prairie" is a cycle of stories set in the Midwest, a surreal landscape of wildflowers, ominous rivers, violence, virtual reality, art, fear, and loss. The conceptual work in "Dresses" reconsiders the canon through the lens of its garb, like a wild literary closet. "Art" turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction relate to one another, a theme central to the whole book. The final section, "Other," collects pieces in irregular ("other") forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious or heartbreaking for reasons as inexplicable as the abiding beauty and strangeness of all of Dutton's work.

Jill McCorkle, author of the New York Times bestseller Life After Life and the widely acclaimed Hieroglyphics, delivers another breathtaking collection of stories that take an intimate look at the moments when a person's life changes forever. Old Crimes: Stories takes readers deep into the lives of characters who hold their secrets and misdeeds close, even as the past continues to reverberate over time and across generations.

And despite the characters' yearnings for connection, they can't seem to tell the whole truth. In "Low Tones," a woman uses her hearing impairment as a way to guard herself from her husband's commentary. In "Lineman," a telephone lineman tries to keep his family close as he feels himself pushed aside in a digital world. The young couple in "Confessional" buys a confessional for fun, only to discover the cost of honesty. Profoundly moving and unforgettable, the stories in Jill McCorkle's new collection reveal why she has long been considered a master of the form.

Each story reads like a compact, brilliantly condensed novel, probing lives full of great intensity, of longing and affection, of deep regret, and of the inability to ever forget an old crime.