A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from 29 authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Colm Toibin, Kamilia Shamsie 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: 100 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 memorialise and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction?

These 29 new stories 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 it will offer perspective and solace to the listener now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory.