NEW YORK ā One of the first novels about the pandemic will be a collaborative effort, with Margaret Atwood, John Grisham and Celeste Ng among the writers.
The Authors Guild Foundation announced Thursday that it had reached a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media to publish āFourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering.ā The story is set on a Manhattan rooftop in 2020 as the virus spreads worldwide and the rich are fleeing the city. Novelist and Authors Guild President Douglas Preston came up with the idea as a way to raise money for the foundation.
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āAt the Guild, we realized that we had an opportunity in these dark times to do something positive and even transformative through the creation of this unusual literary work. Human beings have always confronted tragedy by telling stories, and this book would be our answer to COVID-19,ā Preston said.
āHunger Gamesā author Suzanne Collins made a āmajorā donation to the Guild foundation to support the project. Atwood is editing āFourteen Daysā and helped recruit a wide range of contributors, including Dave Eggers, Ishmael Reed, Monique Truong, Hampton Sides, Mary Pope Osborne and Emma Donoghue. āFourteen Daysā is tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2022.
āThe cast of lively fictional characters on the Manhattan rooftop in āFourteen Daysā have much to say to one another about life during the pandemic and even more about life in general, sometimes getting into discussions, debates or outright quarrels ā and sometimes finding resolution in unexpected moments of empathy and connection,ā Atwood said in a statement.
āTo provide a narrative framework, we structured the work so that the buildingās super records the stories and conversations on her cellphone to create an unauthorized guerilla text.ā
Fiction writers usually need more time than poets or nonfiction writers to absorb historical events, and novels and short stories about the coronavirus remain rare a year into the pandemic. Several picture books have been published, including āHeroes Wear Masks: Elmoās Super Adventureā and āWhile We Can't Hug." Michael Lewis' nonfiction āThe Premonition: A Pandemic Storyā is scheduled for May.
But novelists so far have tended either to use it as a subplot, like Michael Connelly in his thriller āThe Law of Innocence,ā or avoided it, like Stephen King, who in his upcoming āBilly Summersā switched the date of his story from 2020 to 2019. Preston told The Associated Press on Thursday that he isn't ready to write a full-length work on the pandemic.
āIt's too raw and too fresh, and as a novelist you have to take in the experience,ā he says. āI was in New York that terrible week of March 9 when the city shut down, a national emergency was declared and the national guard was surrounding New Rochelle (where an early outbreak occurred). That was one of the most unbelievable weeks of my life and it's very raw.ā