Stories From Quarantine by Various Authors

Source of book: I own this. 

 

Back in 2021, when my wife was still in the midst of hospital insanity due to Covid, we took whatever time we could to get away, if only for a few days. That summer, we traveled to Sonoma County (if you travel to northern California, it is a great place to visit), and spent some time in the fun little town of Sebastopol. Yep, named after the city in Crimea, and proudly a “Nuclear Free Zone” since the 1960s, it retains a lot of its hippie charm, combined with a NorCal hipster vibe. I’d recommend getting the wonderful and affordable meals at King Falafel, ice cream at Screaming Mimi’s, and hard cider at Golden State Cider. Grab some harder stuff at Spirit Works Distillery if you like, but don’t forget to pop into People’s Music, and Copperfield’s Books. And, even better, check out Second Chances Used Books - it’s a great small store with an ever-changing eclectic selection.

 

What was I saying? Oh yeah - Sebastopol is where I saw this book first. I ended up buying something else that trip, but kept an eye out for a used copy of this one, which I eventually bought. 

Stories From Quarantine was originally going to be called the Decameron Project. After all, the original Decameron was a collection of tales (in turn patterned after The Arabian Nights) set during the Bubonic Plague outbreak in Italy. To that end, a variety of modern literary authors were solicited to write a short story with some connection to the Covid pandemic. Quite a few responded, resulting in this collection of 29 tales. 

 

Some of the authors are household names - Margaret Atwood, Edwidge Danticat, and David Mitchell. Others were pretty well known to me from other books I have read - Tommy Orange, Charles Yu, Yiyun Li, Dina Nayeri. But many were names I really didn’t know well at all. One reason for this is that a number of the stories were in translation. I haven’t gone hunting, but I honestly wonder if some of the authors have yet to be translated into English outside of this collection. 

 

Obscurity, however, does not mean poor quality. While there are some really odd stories in this book, I found all of them compelling and well written. True, not everyone is able to write effortlessly in so many genres as Margaret Atwood - she contributes, of all things, a science fiction story with aliens struggling to understand human story idioms. I was certainly confirmed in my love for Yu, Li, and Orange. Yu’s particular contribution is one of the best portraits of what quarantine felt like in 2020. 

 

But I feel like I should give some shout outs to the other authors too. Victor LaValle’s ghost story, Mona Awad’s chilling horror, Liz Moore’s casually terrifying account of a sick child (do you take them to the ER where they might catch Covid or not? Damn), Colm Toibin’s account of the freedom of the bike path - in my native Los Angeles no less! The simmering fury of Andrew O’Hagan’s tale of family estrangement. The fully unexpected twist of Rachel Kushner’s story of a chance international meeting and an infatuation that fades. Karen Russell’s time anomaly story. The surreal story of paranoia (“An Obliging Robber”) by Mia Couto (translated from the Portuguese) wherein the narrator believes the health department worker who shows up in a mask and takes their temperature is a robber - but a really nice one - which turns out to be a biting satire on the indifference to the deaths of the poor from other causes that plagues our world. A thoughtful exploration of the dynamics of an interracial relationship by Uzodinma Iweala. Dina Nayeri’s perceptive account of a quarantine with a child. Laila Lalami’s harrowing story of a woman who has returned to her birth country for a family wedding, only to find herself stranded by the pandemic - she has a job in the US, but because she is not a citizen, she is not even on the radar for being allowed to return to her own life. (While Trump wasn’t the only official at fault here, his open contempt for non-white people was a factor in the shit-show that resulted for immigrants working in the US.) Rivers Solomon’s delicious revenge story. Matthew Baker’s hilarious account of how deprivation led to an unexpected culinary hit. Edwidge Dandicat’s sad account of dying in a hospital without one’s loved ones around - that was in many ways the hardest part of what my wife had to deal with in the thick of the pandemic. Later, fortunately, the vaccines made contact safer, but so many still refused due to politics. 

 

This is barely a taste of what is in this book. I would definitely recommend it for anyone who loves short stories, or who loves literary fiction, or who just wants to re-live some of the feelings of the height of the pandemic. These are good stories, and truly capture so many things of what we experienced.