Description
Book SynopsisBawdy and moving, hilarious and reflective: these stories offer the very best of Boccaccio’s Decameron—an inspiration for the Netflix dark comedy The Decameron—in a brilliant, playful new translation.
“The Decameron reads in some ways as a guide to social distancing and self-isolation.” —The New York Times
In the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories—one hundred stories of love, adventure, and surprising twists of fortune that later inspired Chaucer, Keats, and Shakespeare. Now, this hugely enjoyable volume collects the best stories of Boccaccio's masterwork in a fresh, accessible new translation by Peter Hainsworth. It includes such celebrated, thought-provoking tales as Isabella and the Pot of Basil (famously adapted by Keats) and Pat
Trade Review“The
Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), made a great impression on me. . . . Ten youths—seven women and three men—take turns telling stories for 10 days. At around the age of 16, I found it reassuring that Boccaccio, in conceiving his narrators, had made most of them women. Here was a great writer, the father of the modern story, presenting seven great female narrators. There was something to hope for. . . . The seven female narrators of the
Decameron should never again need to rely on the great Giovanni Boccaccio to express themselves. . . . The female story, told with increasing skill, increasingly widespread and unapologetic, is what must now assume power.” —
Elena Ferrante, The New York Times
