Analog Days
Novel
Coffee House Press, 2025
Excerpt: Opening pages
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2025: “Now more relatable and more timely than ever.”
A snapshot of a circle of friends living through the sorrows and joys of a particular inflection point in history.
LitHub: Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
Searls: The vibe of being receptive to the beauty in the world while that openness makes it hard to fend off bad news and terrible things.
“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)
“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’s sentences move swiftly between markers of routine existence and insight bombs that explode them into a larger context, often in ways that feel humorous at first, then dark… Reading Analog Days [was more like] an ongoing experience than any kind of fixed encounter with an outcome... But what could I expect? To give definitive answers would be to close the loop on the experience and turn away from the porousness with which its storyline blends life and art.” — Erin Langner, Zona Motel
“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