April 1, 2022

Calling on a Lower East Side tenement as COVID descends, this novel introduces us to 14 characters dealing with the crisis. The cool thing: each character is written by a different author, all of them outstanding; they range from Margaret Atwood, Douglas Preston, and Emma Donoghue to Diana Gabaldon, Ishmael Reed, and Tommy Orange. This conversation starter has a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 18, 2023
This beguiling novel of the Covid-19 pandemic was coauthored by 36 members of the Authors Guild, including Atwood, Preston, John Grisham, and Celeste Ng. The loosely connected narrative portrays a group of tenants who regularly convene on the rooftop of their New York City apartment building during the lockdown to share stories with one another. It begins on Mar. 31, 2020, with the arrival of a new unnamed super, who inherits a handbook from her predecessor with a list of the current tenants identified by their nicknames. They include “Whitney,” a librarian who works at the Whitney Museum and tells a ghost story about a fallen soldier at the Alamo. There’s also “Maine,” an ER doctor who’s visiting from Maine to help with the overload of Covid cases, and who shares a story about a nun’s ability to predict patients’ time of death at the doctor’s Maine hospital. As the weeks go by, the super declines to share a story of her own until the final evening on April 13, when her revelation casts the tenants’ situation in a new light. Though the authors’ contributions aren’t identified until the end notes, the reader senses various shifts in style and voice, which can be welcome or jarring, depending on one’s taste. Still, fans of literary puzzles will find this worthwhile.

Starred review from December 1, 2023
The tenants in a dilapidated apartment building on New York's Lower East Side are going lockdown stir-crazy as COVID-19 rampages. The new super, lonely and worried about her ill father, finds refuge on the roof. Soon the renters join her, bringing up chairs and cocktails and telling stories. Gleaning information about the tenants from the ""bible"" left by her predecessor, who assigned each a nickname, the super secretly records and transcribes their confessions and tall tales. The man dubbed Eurovision emcees each evening's performances, and the storytellers are splendidly diverse in race, age, gender, ethnicity, and calling. There's a therapist, lawyer, gallery owner, librarian, veteran, ER doctor, and Instagram influencer. Their ensnaring stories involve heartbreak, family drama, homes lost and found, obsession, travel, murder, even an angel and a spider. Putting a bold new twist on the plague novel, this bountiful, unpredictable, witty, and affecting tale-of-tales is made all the more intriguing by the fact that it's a collaboration by 36 exceptional North American writers, including Angie Cruz, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Alice Randall, Ishmael Reed, Hampton Sides, R. L. Stine, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Meg Wolitzer. This enthralling novel of many voices and moods dramatizes the transformation of isolation into community via stories and explores a grand spectrum of human experiences.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The authors are a draw, the setting and subject magnetic, and there's a feel-good bonus: the proceeds will support the Authors Guild Foundation.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 15, 2023
A Decameron-esque storytelling collaboration with a Covid-19 premise. Thirty-six authors contributed to this lively and predictably somewhat uneven work of fiction sponsored by and benefiting the Authors Guild Foundation, styled as an unclaimed manuscript found in New York's lost property office. The narrative within is set on the rooftop of a Lower East Side "six-floor walk-up with the farcical name of the Fernsby Arms, a decaying crapshack tenement that should have been torn down long ago," per the lively frame story penned by Douglas Preston in the persona of Yessenia Grigorescu, the building's super. From a notebook left by her predecessor in the job, Yessie knows the tenants by evocative sobriquets: The Lady With the Rings, Amnesia, Eurovision, Hello Kitty, the Poet, Vinegar, and so forth. They come up to the roof at 7 p.m. to participate in the huzzah for health care workers, which was a nightly ritual during Manhattan's lockdown, and then settle into the routine of sharing stories, each written by a different author. One is constantly flipping to the backmatter to see who wrote what; though not all authors are household names, plenty are--Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Tommy Orange, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Meg Wolitzer, and more--though it's not always the big names who contribute the best work. Fortunately, Preston's frame story keeps everything moving. Day One gets off to a rollicking start, with stories from Merenguero's Daughter and The Therapist, actually Maria Hinojosa and Celeste Ng. Anchored in Dominican and Chinese culture, respectively, these stories introduce a theme of diversity that's one of the joys of the book. There are ghost stories, a war story, many tales of betrayal and revenge, and a report on Shakespeare's plague experience by scholar James Shapiro. Little to no information is provided about the process behind the book, how contributors were chosen, etc. Since celebrity-watching is part of the draw, that could have been fun. A multicultural tribute to the New York lockdown experience. Many parts are moving and/or funny; others, easy to skip.

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