Analog Days
Novel
Coffee House Press, 2025
A snapshot of a circle of friends living through the sorrows and joys of a particular inflection point in history. Amid the ever-present news cycles of 2016, watching the world shift around them, they fall back on film and friendship and art as the last bastions of meaning in their fragmented lives set adrift among the pivotal events of our times.
Advance Praise
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025: “Now more relatable and more timely than ever.”
“Analog Days by renowned translator Damion Searls is a knockout in style and form. Searls weaves in Gen-X nostalgia with world events and focuses on a group of friends in San Francisco and New York. Revisiting the summer of 2016 was an eerie look at recent history and how much everything has changed since that year. Highly recommended!”
— Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books (Mercer Island, WA)
“Searls offers in these clear-eyed ruminations a Gen Xer’s impressions of the technology and violence that shape 21st-century life… It’s a stimulating attempt at making sense of a gloomy world.” — Publisher’s Weekly
“A quixotic exploration of the recent past that reveals something far deeper about how we will remember the future… Readers of this book wash in and out of the flood of images … only to come up hard against the immutable fact of a headline that both binds us to the experience through shared history and underscores the privilege of hindsight… The book’s real interest lies in the ordinary power of sensation, rather than the flashbulb sensationalism of event.” — Kirkus
“A non-book book about so much and not, akin to classics by Sebald or Adler, both light in its compactness and heavy in an inflated state. With an attention to the United States in 2016, right before, well… it’s a great book for folks who like to focus on distractions.”
— Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)