The Decameron Project is a collection of short stories published by The New York Times that is patterned after The Decameron, a 14th century collection of stories told during the Black Death. It is a series of wildly diverse stories set all around the globe, written by different authors and featuring different characters and situations.

The 29 stories vary greatly in tone—there are melancholy ones and funny ones. There are stories about criminals, stories about families, and stories about strangers thrown together by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The stories also vary greatly in quality, with some legitimately intriguing, and others qualifying more as sketches than actual stories in the traditional sense. More than a handful of the tales contained within inexplicably end in a sudden, unexpected anticlimax. There’s nothing wrong with setting a proper tone for a short story, but some of these stories feel like they end right after the exposition is given.

There are also more experimental stories: a stream-of-consciousness narrative of words and ideas related to the zeitgeist of the pandemic, for example, and an introspective analysis of a strained interracial relationship… during the pandemic.

This is a problem that can also be seen in some of the other stories—the pandemic itself may seem like an afterthought or an insignificant detail. There’s a crime story about blackmailing a murderous jail warden… during the pandemic. There’s an Amazing Stories-esque tale of time stopping at the moment of a potentially fatal accident, giving the people involved a chance to avert disaster and escape death… during the pandemic.

And then there are the very good ones that integrate the pandemic in a way that gives the reader insight not just into the characters and their lives, but into the pandemic experience lived and still being lived by real people today. Worth mentioning is Barcelona: Open City by John Wray, which is an oddball tale of a guy who rents out his dogs to people who want to get around during the lockdown by pretending to walk their pets. The Cellar by Dina Nayeri is a look at life during lockdown in the context of a couple who lived through wartime Tehran, hiding (and, well, coming of age) in the makeshift shelters underneath their houses.

The most remarkable entry, in my opinion, is Origin Story by Matthew Baker: a simple family tale about how traditions are created, and about how family bonds are broken and mended. It’s concise, it teaches something, and it’s honest. It speaks of something that we’ve all experienced during the pandemic: we have maintained connections, and quite possibly we have discovered new dimensions to some of them.

The Decameron Project is not just one thing. Like the experiences of the characters in its stories, it’s an explosion of different ideas and situations. It shows us that the pandemic experience is not just one thing, and that incredibly, at a time where many of us find ourselves sharing the same feelings of isolation and paranoia, the pandemic experience can be anything from laughter to melancholy to terror.

Ultimately, I find that every story contained in the collection contains a familiarity of some sort. We have seen these stories before. We’ve been locked up in our houses and condos, and for most of this time, we’ve been consuming all sorts of stories on social media. Many of the stories in the collection would fit right in. Dog owner rents out pets. Prison inmate is exposed, moved to quarantine facility. Clueless old man mistakes health worker for burglar.

Wife receives one last written message from dying husband whom she never gets to see.

Not all the stories in The Decameron Project will leave a lasting impression. Those that read like a viral headline—those are probably the ones that will.

If I could add a story to this collection, I would write about what I know: what it’s like to teach remotely during the quarantine. As teachers, we have become content creators. If this had to go on, what would teaching be like in the future?

Well, it’s either that, or something about dogs coping with a different kind of dog food during lockdown. I’ll think of something. Eventually.