The Coronavirus Chronicles: Short Stories Emanating from the 21st Century Pandemic

From the author of Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy comes a collection of short stories exploring the effects of pandemic on everyday lives, the frustrations that lovers and friends navigate in their searches for fairytale endings, and the impact of time and memory on our perceptions of happiness.

Set at the outset of a pandemic, "The Coronavirus Sister Rules" charts the courses of action that the four, far-flung Anderson sisters take upon learning the eldest has been hospitalized in Tokyo. The three friends in "The Argentinian Restaurant" have formed a decades-long, celibate love triangle challenged by thinly disguised passions and unspeakable tragedies. In "Man Wakes Up, Discovers There is No Such Thing as Time," Cillian Lynch awakens after a mysterious twelve-year coma in the midst of a global contagion to discover via Zoom that he has only one friend left.

These and other stories in The Coronavirus Collection were written between March 2020 and February 2021, when more than half a million Americans died from Covid-19. Through his stories, Ed Novak has captured eight rays of light bursting through the cracks of the darkness.