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, Edwidge Danticat, 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 Couto 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 Nayeri Origin Story by Matthew Baker To the Wall by Esi Edugyan Barcelona: Open City by John Wray One Thing by Edwidge Danticat