A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Colm Toibin, Kamilia Shamsie, David Mitchell and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio’s The Decameron.

When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it.

In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron : one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables.

In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction?

These twenty-nine new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and offer perspective and solace to the reader now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory.

Table of Contents:

Preface by Caitlin Roper

Introduction by Rivka Galchen

Recognition by Victor LaValle

A Blue Sky Like This by Mona Awad

The Walk by Kamila Shamsie

Tales from the LA River by Colm Toibin

Clinical Notes by Liz Moore

The Team by Tommy Orange

The Rock by Leila Slimani

Impatient Griselda by Margaret Atwood

Under the Magnolia by Yiyun Li

Outside by Etgar Keret

Keepsakes by Andrew O'Hagan

The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase by Rachel Kushner

The Morningside by Tea Obreht

Screen Time by Alejandro Zambra

How We Used to Play by Dinaw Mengestu

Line 19 Woodstock/Glisan by Karen Russell

If Wishes Was Horses by David Mitchell

Systems by Charles Yu

The Perfect Travel Buddy by Paolo Giordano

An Obliging Robber by Mia Cuoto

Sleep by Uzodinma Iweala

Prudent Girls by Rivers Solomon

That Time at My Brother’s Wedding by Laila Lalami

A Time of Death, The Death of Time by Julian Fuks

The Cellar by Dina Nayeli

Origin Story by Matthew Baker

To the Wall by Esi Edugyan

Barcelona: Open City by John Wray

One Thing by Edwidge Danticat