“A new collection of essays from the beloved Beard, along with two pieces of fiction...prose that excavates all our most human secrets.”

—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“Elegiac…Charged with fine detail…In Beard’s book, writing works like compound interest, each experience building on the last, which built on the one before…The loss of aged dogs, perfidious husbands, luminous moments of friendship and youth, are all reconceived and reanimated in the telling, which makes them resonate with one another and become something new…something more.”

—Ellen Akins, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“‘I love how you love things,’ someone who loves her tells Jo Ann Beard. That love is one reason Festival Days is such a great book. Another is her flair for describing those things in vibrant and felicitous prose. Beard honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life, and for life’s inescapable cruelties and woes she offers the wisdom of a sage.”

—Sigrid Nunez, author of What Are You Going Through

“A new collection from the masterful storyteller Jo Ann Beard is always reason to celebrate…Written with clear-eyed empathy, these nine pieces have the luminous glow of fireflies caught in a child’s hand.”

—Chicago Review of Books

“An artistic triumph—vividly peopled, elegantly written, and full of surprises. Each essay and story is an electrically charged tale of loss and partial redemption. Reading Jo Ann Beard is like setting out on a walk with a curious and intelligent friend who is determined to show you how seemingly unrelated things share a secret kinship.”

—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game

“Beard is an exacting writer, and her books endure…Her cascades of breathtaking detail are irresistible…There is extraordinary energy and force in Beard’s refined, penetrating, darkly rhapsodic prose as she writes of family, dogs, love, friendship, chaos, and danger in zigzagging associations, spiraling juxtapositions, and sudden switchbacks, seeking to ‘make art’ out of life and succeeding brilliantly and profoundly.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“An absolute marvel…Genre is not important here, because, as Beard demonstrates in her writing, life as we know it is full of bizarre, sad, beautiful, unbelievable, indescribable things—events that transform our real lives into surreal experiences.”

—Chelsea Hodson, Bomb

“Festival Days shimmers with emotional intensity…Beard’s literary powers are most evident in the long eponymous essay that concludes this collection. Here, Beard weaves metaphor and memory into a stunning portrait of lifelong friendship, of those relationships that hold us and ground us across the decades, that persist with love even to the final goodbye.”

—Catherine Hollis, BookPage (starred review)

“Festival Days is profoundly observed and impeccably phrased. No surprises there, given Jo Ann Beard’s formidable talents. But it’s actually full of audacious narrative surprises, is darkly moving, and is, at times, unexpectedly—almost unbearably—suspenseful.”

—Geoff Dyer, author of White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World