Even if the whole world looks like absurdity, a good book will not let you go crazy. People tell stories from the beginning of time. They talk about what they saw and what they heard about. They talk about what was and what could have been. They tell to distract, pass the time or survive difficult times. Sometimes such stories turn into chronicles, annals, monuments to individual periods and eras. So appeared "Tales of a Thousand One Nights," "Canterbury Tales" and "Decameron" by Boccaccio. "New Decameron" is also a kind of monument to the era, which will definitely go down in history. The editors of The New York Times Magazine collected 29 short stories, essays, fairy tales, tiny sketches and detailed reasoning. In them, the most famous modern writers tried to capture and comprehend the events that swept every corner of the world. The collection includes short stories by Margaret Atwood, Colm Toybin, Leila Slimani, Rachel Kushner, Etgar Keret, David Mitchell, Mona Awad and many others.