Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel

An ambitious collaborative novel - not a collection of linked stories - set in New York in late March and early April 2020, at the beginning of the global pandemic, as COVID-19 infections and deaths skyrocket in the city and state, and everyone is in lockdown. At the Fernsby Arms, a decrepit old apartment building ignored by the landlord, a new super, Romanian-American Yessie, and the various tenants make their way up to the roof each night, banging pots and pans to support essential healthcare workers, and telling stories, a la the Canterbury Tales, while they wait. Preconceptions and prejudices they hold about and against each other fall away as they learn more about one another. Various genres are employed, and the ending answers show more many questions.

Quotes

"And you know what all this solitude has made me realize, that I've been lying to myself. When the shit hits the fan, we're alone. And that people will kill each other for the last roll of toilet paper." (Day Three, p. 50)

This world - to what may I liken it?
To autumn fields darkening at dust,
dimply lit by lightning flashes. (Day Five, p. 103)

"Progress is really just the fiction every generation tells itself to justify the current fashion in ignorance, fear, and prejudice." (Day Six, p. 133)

"It was hard to argue about assimilation, a process that was inevitable and that required you to erase large parts of yourself. I didn't know if I had been erased yet..." (Day Nine, 200)

*Spoiler*
Everyone on the roof is a ghost, dead of COVID. show less

I believe the Covid pandemic is going to provide much fodder for literature, just as the world wars have. It makes sense since these events affected so many and changed life as we knew it.

This book is a series of interconnected stories set in an apartment block in New York City during the pandemic lockdown. I listened to the audiobook and my one regret is that there was no additional information about which author wrote which piece. In all as there was in the printed edition, 36 authors contributed to the book so, obviously, more than one person created each tale. Maybe it doesn't matter but it would just provide a finishing touch.

The residents of the Fernsby Arms gather on the roof of the building each night in order to take part in show more the nightly ritual of noisemaking to show appreciation for health care workers. They linger on after that outburst, all carefully social distanced, and tell stories. The building's superintendant covertly records the stories and then transcribes them into a scrapbook left behind by her predecessor. Her predecessor kept notes about all the tenants and gave them all nicknames. They are a diverse group so their stories are quite different. Many deal with death and/or ghosts as may be expected given the time they are experiencing. No one seems to have contact with anyone outside the building. The superintendant's father is in a nursing home and she hasn't been able to reach anyone there. A doctor staying in the building while she helps out in the emergency ward of a local hospital (although she's on leave right now) also can't get through. Residents, including the super, hear strange noises in an apartment that is supposed to be vacant. Occasionally, strangers show up on the roof top when the super knows the door to the outside is locked tight. It's all a little spooky but also very interesting. And the ending absolutely threw me for a loop. I didn't see that coming.

The Decameron, a similar book of stories supposedly written by a group of people who fled Florence during the Black Death, is referenced several times. Obviously, this provided a starting point for this collective of writers but they gave it a twenty-first century spin. One obvious difference is that the people in The Decameron left the city whereas these people were the ones left behind when the well-off fled the city. show less

This is a confusing audiobook. Without words, there is no way to consistently identify each narrator of rooftop tales rendered by tenants cloistered by the early days of Covid in a derelict tenement in lower Manhattan. They assemble every evening to celebrate the first responders and to swap mostly sad and some truly gruesome stories. I did not find any of them particularly memorable, though the roster of authors involved in this Decameron-like project (in fact, one of the more amusing stories is one where the white professors teaching a literature course are severely criticized by each of their students, for choosing The Decameron as the subject of the course) includes almost every renowned contemporary writer you've ever read, ie show more Tommy Orange, Margaret Atwood (editor), Celeste Ng, and De'Shawn Charles Winslow. The ending is one I did not see coming, though I'm sure that many readers of horror and fantasy did, and I liked it the best of all the stories. There's a big clue at the very beginning, but who could remember it twelve discs later? The author of each tale is revealed to anyone who buys the audio, but not to a reader who borrowed it from the library. At this point, I'm not too bothered by missing the ownership. If the Author's Guild makes bank from it, that's fine. show less

So many books coming out referencing the pandemic -- this one fascinated me. Collectively written by 36 authors, many genres, many of whom I have read. Set in a rundown tenement house in NYC in the first 14 days. The individuals quarantined in the building end up gathering nightly on the roof, to cheer for the essential workers in the city, and to share stories. Oral history in a pandemic. Go figure. The stories weave around. The characters are diverse, yet stuck in the same situation. 2024 read.

FOURTEEN DAYS: A COLLABORATIVE NOVEL
Created by The Authors Guild for their foundation funding the book is collectively written by 36 American and Canadian authors whose work spans a variety of literary genres. This isn't a cohesive story unless the parameter is coping with the shutdown. Worth the read for a modern example of a “frame” narrative, for anyone that loves stories and storytelling.

I liked the premise of this book. 30 different authors contributed to people telling stories on the roof of an apartment building in NYC during the initial days of the pandemic. The profits from the book are for the benefit of the Authors Guild of America. At some points the stories dragged for me but as I finished a chapter I consulted the back of the book to see who wrote. It almost always made sense!

NYC during the onset of the COVID-19 shutdown, the tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building congregate on the roof top and tell stories or not. Written by numerous well-known authors, the Authors Guild has put together a story that flows with different points of view and voices. Some were better than others, but overall quite fascinating. I wondered how it all tied together and the ending was satisfying to me.