From the author of the novel “Confessions of a Lapsed Altar Boy” comes “The Coronavirus Chronicles,” 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 the 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 love triangle challenged by thinly disguised passions and unspeakable tragedies. In “Man Wakes Up, Discovers There is No Such Thing as Time,” Cillian Lynch awakes after a mysterious twelve-year coma in the midst of a global contagion to discover from his only friend a terrible truth about his football idol.

These and the other stories in “The Coronavirus Chronicles” 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 of that time in history.

In “The Four Seasons of Renee,” we follow the journey of a woman seeking independence while struggling with mental health issues. She navigates out of a long-term, indefinable liaison with Carl, a man her three sisters refer to as “The Inattentive Alcoholic,” and into a promising affair with Jerry, a man whom her sisters deem as possessing more appropriate qualities.

However, while traversing this path and its attendant seasons, Renee will engage in behavior some would deem self-sabotaging and others self-defining. One thing remains a constant: Renee and her sisters will have brunch.

In “Ruby and Teddy’s Coronavirus Adventure,” it’s March of 2020, and the public awareness of something called the “novel coronavirus” is rising rapidly amidst unsettling news emanating from China, Europe, and the West Coast.

We find Ruby and Teddy in the middle of a road trip from their home in New Jersey with a destination of Key West. As they arrive in North Carolina, things get surreal for them, like the early scenes of a horror movie.

Based on real-life events.

In “The Photograph, “Martin discovers a faded, forty-year-old photograph of himself and two young women in a beach in the Middle East. He and one of the women, Sandra, had spent the day and night together, and have not seen each other since. Martin reconnects with Sandra through Facebook. When Sarah and her husband decide to take a road trip through the city where Martin lives, he invites her to lunch. She accepts, and unanticipated revelations ensue.

In “LuLu Lunches with Oscar,” we meet best friends who have met every month for years to gossip at an out-of-the-way restaurant in our nation’s capital. LuLu is married to an ex-Congressman from Texas nicknamed Booger. Oscar, an academic and author, is contemplating a second marriage to a woman LuLu does not accept for her friend.

Booger’s parents, hounded out of Texas by friends of his ex-wife’s have moved in with Booger, LuLu, and their two sons in a posh Washington DC suburb. When LuLu complains to Oscar about the intrusion of her in-laws, he suggests she create a comedy routine focused on the Texas visitors.

And then LuLu asks, “Why didn’t you and I get married?” After Oscar answers her question, the two of them finish their desserts in pregnant silence and then agree on who will pay for next month’s luncheon.

Twelve years ago, a New York attorney named Cillian Murphy fell into a mysterious coma after watching the New England Patriots lose in the Super Bowl. In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, he has awakened in a nursing home in Quincy, Massachusetts, near where he had been raised.

The nursing home called his only living listed contact, Cillian’s erstwhile best friend, who is charged with briefing Cillian over Zoom about events and persons in his life. The conversations turn awkward, as the friend struggles to reveal the truth about Cillian’s mother, girlfriend, possessions, and The Golden Surfers. And then they have a fateful back-and-forth about legendary quarterback Tom Brady…

The author Ed Novak reads an excerpt from “The Coronavirus Sister Rules,” a short story from “The Coronavirus Chronicles.”

In early 2020, Jessie, president of a theological seminary and first among equals of the four Andersen sisters, is attending a conference in Tokyo, Japan, when she tests positive for the novel coronavirus. A cool and logical thinker, she plots out how to notify her three sisters (Spain, northern New Jersey, California), her father (California), her two children (Illinois and California), and her husband (South Pole) from her hospital bed.

Each conversations carries the weight of emotional luggage packed over decades of love and misunderstandings, as well as Jessie’s sudden awareness of her mortality in the face of this little-understood peril. In this reading, we can hear that the call to her son in college in the Midwest can best be described as suboptimal.

The author Ed Novak reads from the short story “Excellent Experience with a Beautiful Woman,” part of the collection “The Coronavirus Chronicles.”

Still reeling from the termination of his marriage of twenty-two years and seeking to regain his bearings, Dexter drives hours and hours to visit his best friend Francis, who lives in a small town on the north shore of Long Island Sound. Arriving late at night, the two men decide to go skinny dipping in the cool water with the lights of New York glowing in the distance.

Soon afterwards, they are joined by Virginia, who lives with her husband and daughter next door to Francis. After a long shift at work, she is too wired to go to bed and has learned from Francis’ wife that he and a friend have gone swimming. She disrobes and enters the water with a glass of wine for herself and two bottles of beer for the men.

As they tread water, sip alcohol, and gaze at the constellations they talk first about polite subjects. Then Virginia, perhaps feeling vulnerable in their shared nakedness, changes the subject to that of how people survive the negation of their existence caused by failed marriages and go on with the rest of their lives. Virginia’s teenage daughter, in a state of mortification, comes to retrieve her mother, ending the conversation.

However, Dexter and Francis understand that they have had an excellent experience with a beautiful woman.

Based on real-life experience.

The author Ed Novak reads from the story “The Argentinian Restaurant,” part of the collection “The Coronavirus Chronicles.”

For the past twenty-seven years, Oliver, Bernadette, and Natalie have met for lunch on this date. Each year, they dine at an Argentinian restaurant near Rockefeller Center that catered to tourists and local office workers on a budget. It was an anniversary of sorts whose origins were obscured in the myriad and variegated veils of memory.

At the beginning of their adult journey, Oliver and Natalie were lovers doomed by her need for stability and affluence. Oliver turned to Bernadette, but she could not escape the tractor beam of her family’s expectations. The three friends formed a decades-long love triangle propped up by the geometry of mutually assured destruction should any of them seek to break the bonds of chaste friendship.

Then one day an unspeakable crime challenges their friendship and leads to a tragedy that shatters the friendship.