Interesting idea. A collection of short stories by a cohort of noted writers (including Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, R. L. Stine, and Dave Eggers) set during the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in New York City. Basically the residents of a somewhat downbeat apartment block meet every evening for two weeks on the roof of their building, suitably socially distanced, to tell each other stories, and bang their pots for the health workers risking their lives in the streets and hospitals below. The thirty eight stories vary - some are old love stories, there are tales of dysfunctional family problems, ghost tales, and even the repeated sighting of an angel in South America. The linkage is Covid, the building, the shared experience. The narrator is the building's supervisor, a somewhat hard on her luck woman, whose father is apparently in a nursing home with Covid. The twist in the tale revealed at the end is that they are all dead - this is heaven - they all died of Covid, and the occasional visit by a new person or family (and eventually the supervisors father) are merely new ghosts joining their ranks. I enjoyed it, it was clever, but it was very long, and the stories inevitably were a mixed bag.

Published February 2024. Read on Kindle. An Authors Guild Foundation collaborative project.