The Coronavirus Chronicles (Paperback)

From the author of Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy comes a collection of short stories exploring the effects of pandemic on everyday lives, the frustrations that lovers and friends navigate in their searches for fairytale endings, and the impact of time and memory on our perceptions of happiness.

Set at the outset of a pandemic, “The Coronavirus Sister Rules” charts the courses of action that the four, far-flung Anderson sisters take upon learning the eldest has been hospitalized in Tokyo. The three friends in “The Argentinian Restaurant” have formed a decades-long, celibate love triangle challenged by thinly disguised passions and unspeakable tragedies. In “Man Wakes Up, Discovers There is No Such Thing as Time,” Cillian Lynch awakens after a mysterious twelve-year coma in the midst of a global contagion to discover via Zoom that he has only one friend left.

These and other stories in The Coronavirus Collection were written between March 2020 and February 2021, when more than half a million Americans died from Covid-19. Through his stories, Ed Novak has captured eight rays of light bursting through the cracks of the darkness.

Ed Novak has had many professional lives including book publishing, consulting, higher education, the arts, and government regulatory oversight. His first novel, "Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy," was published by Kitewizard Press in 2024.Ed was born in southern California and raised in the San Francisco suburbs. He has lived in Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and two cities in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg and Camp Hill. He currently resides in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Tucson, Arizona. His avocation is the study of disintermediation. He is a founding member of the band The Stan Smiths, the driving force behind the "Nectar of the Gods" art exhibit on Instagram, and producer of the film "The 95 Feces." He is a former member of the Seersucker Caucus in the state capital of Pennsylvania."In my best job, I occasionally called up the local police, informed them of actions I was about to undertake and where, and ask them not to arrest me," he stated. "While working as a wet-behind-the-ears office temp, I wrote a speech delivered by Terence Cardinal Cooke to a room full of wealthy donors at the old Waldorf-Astoria in New York."He was once the #1 Ed Novak on the Internet.He is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he was awarded the Morris Historical Medal. He also earned a master's degree in history from the University of Chicago.