Corona City

Voices from an Epicenter

By: Lorraine Ash, Sherry Wachter

Narrated by: full cast

Corona City chronicles life in New York and New Jersey, the nation’s first COVID-19 epicenter, during the four terrifying months of March through June 2020. Short writings lay bare the challenges, fears, losses, and triumphs of real people in their own words. Listeners will meet COVID-19 survivors, frontline workers, business owners, journalists, mask makers, quarantined people, and many others. Emerging from this mosaic of voices is a grassroots history of an unprecedented time.

Winner – 2023 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) for Outstanding Audiobook of the Year

Winner - 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for Best Anthology and Best COVID-19 Pandemic Book

Featured in New Jersey Monthly: 2021 Summer Reading List

Featured in Forbes: 2020 Column by Elizabeth Karmel

©2020 Magic Dog Press (P)2022 Sherry Wachter

Brought Me Back

Because Covid had such an impact on me (I lost multiple people), I read every personal account I can find. I actually find it comforting because it reminds me how many others went through the same thing. This is a collection of short personal essays recounting what it was like in NY and NJ at the height of the pandemic. I found it very moving and I recommend it to anyone who is still grieving and wants to hear other’s experiences.

Compelling, authentic, and personal

This book is a fascinating and compelling collection of deeply personal essays that describe a wide variety of aspects of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly all these comfortably bite-sized essays are autobiographical, written during or shortly after those first few months of 2020 and collectively making for a strikingly intimate and thought-provoking portrait of a unique time in history.

“Corona City” provides not only a wide-ranging factual record of what people in a specific area of the US went through, but also (and more significantly) a poignant, emotional reminder of what people everywhere were thinking and feeling, and the kinds of challenges they faced, as they waded through the uncertainty of those days, weeks, and months. Many details, both large and small, have a ring of familiarity and will recall the reader’s own experiences.

The writing is accessible, authentic, engaging, and smooth; it is also carefully and tightly edited, constantly drawing the reader in. The essays are smartly organized into categories, grouped by common themes (e.g. Arrival, Front Lines, Losses, Hidden Effects, Education, and others).

Highly recommended!

A hard recount of a major life period for many.

While reading these short recounts gathered by Lorraine Ash for this I was thoroughly more upset than sad because more often than not it was a perspective in the story about normal middle and upper class people from New York and New Jersey. That said there was also the side of me that felt this way because of the stories told in here by nurses that were of course sad but also gave hints of positivity . I'm giving this its rating because of the morbid curiosity to know stories of the northeast even from a year that was the worst nightmare from years preceding that were leading up to it.

A part of me wanted to understand how the more stable parts of America handled this pandemic from everyday people that have lived there life's and have family who have lived their adult life there. It's an imbalance of society but one that could not be avoided for anyone who just were trying to live but had other problems against them in America's predomiantly racialized and wealthy domiant culture. Though I got some stories on first responders of the first days in the Corona Pandemic, even they were often more privileged than most in this anthology. I could not give it a higher rating ultimately for those obvious reasons.