Thank you to Net Galley and the Publishing Company for this Advanced Readers Copy of Fourteen Days by The Authors Guild!

REVIEW: Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel

Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel is an excellent experiment in which many talented authors come together to tell a story set during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea of sharing a narrative from the viewpoints of different residents in a New York City apartment building is intriguing.

That said, the execution can be a bit hit or miss. The stories' quality, tone, and style vary greatly, creating a somewhat disjointed reading experience. Some parts are engaging and thought-provoking, while others feel rushed or undercooked. The framing story about the building's super is a neat idea, but it doesn’t always mesh well with the individual stories.

Even with its ups and downs, Fourteen Days examines how the pandemic affected writers and their creations. It’s a good attempt at collaborative storytelling that doesn’t always work, but it’s worth checking out for its unique approach!

Thank you, Netgalley and Harper, for the free advanced copy for my honest review!

This was such a delightful anthology of stories. I usually steer clear of these but I had to read anything Margaret Atwood put her name towards.

The Authors Guild’s Fourteen Days is a novel unlike any other. Set during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this book features the tenants of a NYC apartment building gathering together on their rooftop every night to tell stories over the course of fourteen days. But what makes this novel really special is that it is a collaborative effort among 36 different literary figures, who each take turns writing the stories told in this book. The novel is compiled in such a way that you do not know which author has written which story without referring to the key at the back of the book; however, fans of some of these authors may be able to recognize their writing right away. I, for one, knew when I was on R.L. Stine’s chapter, having read his Goosebump series prolifically as a child.

As far as the stories go, some were really intriguing and compelling, while others I could take or leave. But that is often how it goes in real life - some people you are inexplicably drawn to while with others, you just never hit it off. I found some new authors to check out through my reading of this book, and I appreciated the chance to sample the work of many authors who I have heard of, but never read.

I was pretty set on rating this book 3.5 stars until I reached the end, which completely took me by surprise. After that, I bumped my rating up to 4 stars because I found the conclusion to be an interesting way to tie all of these stories together.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an advance copy of this title in exchange for honest feedback.

Fourteen Days is a collaborative novel of the pandemic . Set in a New York apartment building at the height of the Covid-19 lockdown, the diverse residents of the Fernsby Arms Apartment Building on the Lower East Side, gather at twilight each evening on the roof- top to tell each other stories, rarely has a collaborative novel been so seamlessly and flawlessly constructed. Readers will find themselves immersed once again in the confusion, fear, and heroism of the pandemic.
“I’ve often thought about the process of being forgotten. first we die. Then the people who knew you and can tell your stories die, then those people die. When your stories die with them, that’s when you’re finally and truly gone.”

Highly recommended.

I didn't really enjoy this collection as much as I thought I would. I think the concept was interesting but I just didn't find many of the stories very engaging. I do appreciate what they were trying to do though.

I enjoyed the few chapters but then it became slow moving an some of the day were plain boring and i skimmed them. with all the amazing others i had hight expectation but was greatly disappointed

This was a very interesting book with a different approach to story telling. It is set during the first part of the COVID lockdown and the authors really brought back experiences that many of us lived through. For anyone who would be triggered by these memories, you may want to wait to read this book. There were many things that I had forgotten over the years but these stories brought them right back.
This is not a typical storyline. The characters each tell individual stories that don't link to each other. Some stories were riveting, others were strange, and others didn't seem to make sense. It really makes you realize how important it is to keep the authors voice in a story. Their voices appeal to all of us differently and that makes it so much fun!
This is not a book to race through. Take your time and
Enjoy.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in New York City, in a Lower East Side tenement a group of tenants share their stories of the first days. This is a collaborative novel where each character is written anonymously by a major literary author. It is a touching portrayal of everyday people caught in a mind blowing circumstance and trying to find some sort of hope to carry on. Their city is shut down , their jobs are closed, their freedom to move is stopped, separated from loved ones and people are rapidly dying. The scenes of the nightly shot out to the medical teams is nearly heartbreaking. For those of us living through the pandemic out in the rest of the country this is a poignant look at New Yorker's experience. It is a picture of communities becoming stronger and building friendships and trust they would never have developed in any other circumstance. This is a beautiful work.

I swore I would not read another book, at least for a long time, that involved the Covid Pandemic. Never say never. Margaret Atwood “takes the helm” of this collaborative novel that spans 14 days in a NYC apartment building. Each day the tenants meet on the roof with social distance, and tell stories. Each of the chapters is written by a different author. It’s is much more than a bunch of short stories strung together. It is a cohesive collaboration of renowned authors telling one story with many facets. As such some parts are mor interesting to the reader, depending on the reader’s tastes. Fourteen Days is a collaboration of the Authors Guild Foundation and all proceeds go to the funds earmarked to support the authors that had setbacks due to the pandemic. Bravo to the many authors, editors and pubisher, a big bravo to Margaret Atwood.

This collaborative novel by multiple well-known authors was a grand undertaking. Set in an apartment building during April 2020, it brings together a cast of residents who come together on the roof every night to share stories. For me, the descriptions of what was happening in NYC was the strongest part of the book. Some of the stories the residents tell are interesting but others were not. Not quite what I was expecting but overall a decent read.

Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and written by 36 authors under the auspices of the Authors Guild, is the first Covid 19 book I have read. Until now, I haven’t been able to read any of the books I’ve seen reviewed that take place during Covid lockdowns. What got me this time was, first, authors I trust to be thoughtful and original and, second, that this book uses a similar structure to one of the great plague novels of Western history, The Decameron. A Covid book in which the characters escape their circumstances through stories? I can get on board with that.

Superintenant of the very down at its heels Fernsby Arms apartment buildng, Yesse, discovered a refuge on the roof of the building. She has a couch. She has her cocktails. She has the quiet of not dealing with the tenants. But then the other tenants find out about the roof—to her great annoyance—and gather there for a change of scenery. After a few nights, they start to tell stories. The people who Yesse only knows from nicknames like Vinegar or Eurovision or Hello Kitty reveal their histories and thoughts to neighbors they worked so hard to ignore before the pandemic.

The stories are mostly melancholy but run the gamut from satirical looks at cancel culture to doomed love stories to tales of revenge. Even though so many authors contributed to this book, I honestly couldn’t tell where one started and another began. This book is astonishingly well edited. The only real hint that there are multiple authors is the way that this book feels like a large conversation about Covid, about relationships, about art—and so many other things. I’ve never read The Decameron (which makes a hilarious cameo in one of the stories), so I’m not sure how much Fourteen Days echoes Boccaccio’s work. I’ll leave that question to other reviewers.

Along with the parade of stories, the authors of Fourteen Days build an overarching narrative about what’s going on in and around the Fernsby Arms. That super-narrative packs a hell of an emotional wallop that I don’t want to spoil for other readers. I mention it because the power of this book’s conclusion is a major selling point, as if this amazing book needed any more. I know I will need to come back to in a few years, because I feel that a little more distance will help me be more open to all the things Fourteen Days has to say.

So many talented authors contributed stories to this modern version of The Decameron, the latter a book of stories told by a group sheltering from the European plague and the book in question featuring stories told by a group of tenants sheltering together on their rooftop during the COVID lockdown of 2020. although I liked some of the stories, not all are of equal quality. That’s to be expected, of course, but that variability is not what ultimately keeps Fourteen Says from succeeding. Its fatal flaw is the disappointing underlying premise that’s reveal at the book’s end.

During the height of the Covid pandemic, many authors found their calendars suddenly empty: no bookstore readings, no writers’ conferences, no research trips.

That’s when Author’s Guild president Douglas Preston had a brilliant idea: why not reach out to suddenly idle writers and ask them to contribute stories to a novel taking place during that time? He roped in Margaret Atwood as a co-editor, and the book project, Fourteen Days, was off the races.

Set in a Lower East Side tenement in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Fourteen Days features a collection of diverse characters who are stuck in lockdown because they can’t afford to escape to country houses in the Hamptons or elsewhere.

To ease the boredom, they meet every night on their tenement’s rooftop to tell stories to each other. What they create is more than an antidote to boredom, but a true community.

Each character is written by a different author, including such luminaries as Dave Eggers, Erica Jong, John Grisham, Meg Wolitzer and Scott Turow, as well as my guests Robert Preston and Emma Donoghue.

The proceeds from Fourteen Days are supporting the Author’s Guild fight against book bans, AI attacks on copyright and more protections for authors.

I was excited to read based on both the premise and the authors involved, but it didn't meet my expectations.

*I received a free ARC of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a review*.

I absolutely love the concept of this book, and the fact that so many great writers were able to contribute. I do feel like they accomplished the task they set out to, and that the novel reads cohesively as one text. You obviously do get to see the different authors’ voices shine in the parts they wrote, but it doesn’t detract from the cohesion because each is writing as a different character for the most part, and so the different tones and approaches can be explained by that.

I am someone who reads mostly for language and characters, and I think readers with similar preferences would enjoy this book. However, I could see this not being everyone’s cup of tea. The overall structure of the book is fairly loose so as to allow for many short stories throughout. I could guess that more plot-oriented readers or those who do not enjoy collected/related short stories may not enjoy this as much. Even though I do like short stories, there were some parts that I preferred over others (which is maybe to be expected with so many different authors contributing).

Ultimately, the ending didn’t really land with me, and even though I felt like the intensity went up as the text progressed, I think I prefer the earlier chapters. The ending and some of the chapters that didn’t hold my interest are why I am rating it as I am. Still, that is a personal preference, and it was still an enjoyable read overall. I think, if nothing else, it was fun to essentially get a sampler of new and familiar authors. You don’t know who wrote what until the end, which was fun, and in going over the list I found some authors that I haven’t read before that now I plan to explore more.

I really hope to see more projects like this in the future.

The lineup of contributors to this book are outrageously impressive; I’ve been waiting to read this for over a year solely on that point. The whole just doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts, alas.
The basic structure is roughly that of short stories loosely tied together by a pretty barebones narrative. The characters are telling stories—standing in for their creators, who, after all, are professional storytellers. The stories themselves seem like they might be more interesting to fellow storytellers; following along from outside of the circle isn’t as interesting. The phrasing of many, too, feels unnatural—it’s easier to see a monologue delivered live instead of reading one.
All in all, this might be best for enthusiastic short story readers and folks looking to relive the early pandemic anxiety.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc.

Clever, compelling, and original. Fourteen Days is a recommended purchase for most general fiction collections.

This novels cleaver concept of bringing together various writers to create one book is brilliant. While the novel reads seamlessly, the styles are different however it doesn’t at all distract from the plot. The pandemic and its aftermath, is something we all must come to grips with. Reading this was a soothing way to tap into others experience of this historic moment, while perhaps helping the reader traverse their own memories. Phenomenal book