In the face of the world they know ending around them, what do storytellers do? Do they hide and simply survive? No, they write, but what to write? Do they turn to writing escapist tales? Or do they write about the world the way only they can?
In the 14th century, the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, was ravaging Europe. In Florence, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio wrote “Il Decameron” or “The Decameron,” a book about trying to survive the Black Death.
This was the inspiration that triggered a most unusual project by the New York Times Magazine. It arose from novelist Rivka Galchen’s story pitch suggesting that the locked-down denizens of New York pick up “The Decameron…
Keep on reading: Writing the body pandemic