A collaborative effort is one of the first novels about the pandemic, with Margaret Atwood, John Grisham and Celeste Ng among the writers.
The Authors Guild Foundation announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media to publish Fourteen days: Collection without permission. The story is set on the summit of Manhattan in 2020 as the virus spreads around the world and the rich flee the city. Douglas and President of the Authors’ Association Douglas Preston came up with the idea as a way to raise money for the foundation.
“At the Society, we realized that in these dark times we had the opportunity to do something positive and even transformative by creating this extraordinary literary work. Mankind has always been against tragedy by telling stories, and this book would be a response to COVID-19, ”said Preston.
Hunger games Author Suzanne Collins made a “major” donation to the Society’s foundation to support the project. Atwood is editing “Fourteen Days” and has helped recruit a wide range of donors, including Dave Eggers, Ishmael Reed, Monique Truong, Hampton Sides, Mary Pope Osborne and Emma Donoghue. Fourteen days definitely scheduled for spring 2022.
“The team of animated fictional characters on top of Manhattan Indoors Fourteen days have a lot to say to each other about life during the pandemic and even more about life in general, sometimes engaging in conversations, debates or quarries altogether – and sometimes finding solutions at times that were not expectation of empathy and connection, ”Atwood said in a statement.
“To provide a narrative framework, we structured the work so that the building’s masterpiece records the stories and conversations on its cell phone to create unauthorized guerilla text. ”
Fiction writers usually need more time than poets or non-fiction writers to cover historical events, and novels and short stories about the coronavirus are still a rare year into the epidemic. Several picture books have been published, including Heroes wear masks: Elmo’s Super Adventure and As long as we can’t do Hug. Non-fiction Michael Lewis The Prediction: The Pandemic Story scheduled for May.
But novels so far have tended to be used as a subpoena, like Michael Connelly in his thrush The law of the innocent, or avoided, like Stephen King, who was to come Billy Summers he changed the date of his story from 2020 to 2019. Preston reported Related Media on Thursday is not ready to write a full-time job on the pandemic.
“It’s too raw and too fresh, and as a novelist you have to incorporate the experience,” he said. “I was in New York that horrible week on March 9 when the city closed, a national emergency was declared and the national guard was around New Rochelle (where an early uprising took place). It was one of the most incredible weeks of my life and it’s very raw. ”