The Decameron Project

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 …