Praise for Days of Awe

“A. M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies. . . . Days of Awe is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor. . . . One wants to read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine. . . . Days of Awe feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker. Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly also a little menacing.”

—Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review

“Exuberantly transgressive.”

—O, the Oprah Magazine

“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark heart of human nature—with irreverent wit, devastating empathy, and haunting shocks . . . Days of Awe [is] a memorable assortment of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate.”

—Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

“Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.”

—Vanity Fair

“Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with anything and the spectacle is delightful.”

—Molly Livingston, The Paris Review Daily

“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.”

—Time

“In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells of our hearts.’”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Versatile and imaginative, Homes brings her literary daring and prowess . . . to short stories. . . . In her third provocative story collection, she displays her command of the viciously realistic and the pointedly surreal, the comic and the tragic. A master of honed dialogue—play-like in their momentum, many of these tales have an Edward Albee aura—Homes is also potently visual and acknowledges artists who inspire her. . . . [It] is the searing precision of her language and her profound and thorny concerns that infuse these unpredictable tales with their unnerving power. . . . Virtuoso Homes, aligned with Grace Paley, Joy Williams, and Lydia Millet, is fierce, witty, defining, and compassionate.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“With her signature humor and compassion, A. M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in her new collection—exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.”

—Chicago Review of Books