Recommendations
Books Like The Decameron
Best books to read after The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Readers who love The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio are drawn to its combination of the bawdy and the tragic, the comic and the courtly, the extraordinary range of one hundred tales about human ingenuity, desire, fortune, and the clergy's hypocrisy. They want works that deal with frame narratives, short fiction collections, the Italian literary tradition, and the tradition of writers who have returned to Boccaccio as a source.
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The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer
The most important contemporary parallel in European literature — Chaucer drew on Boccaccio directly for several tales, and the Canterbury Tales' frame narrative of pilgrims telling stories is the English equivalent of the Decameron's ten Florentines sheltering from the plague; reading both together reveals what each author took from the frame-narrative tradition.
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One Thousand and One Nights
by Anonymous
The Arabic frame narrative that preceded and influenced the European tradition — Scheherazade's tales to forestall her execution are the Eastern tradition's equivalent of the Decameron's plague-sheltered storytelling; both works use a framing emergency to motivate storytelling and both move between genres with extraordinary range.
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Dubliners
by James Joyce
The modern short story collection that inherits the Decameron's ambition to portray a whole society through individual stories — Joyce's Dublin sketches are the modernist equivalent of Boccaccio's Florence portraits; both works use the short story form to show a city in moral and social cross-section.
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Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
The American short story sequence that parallels the Decameron's portrait of a community — Anderson's 'grotesque' characters in a small Ohio town form a connected portrait of stunted lives and unexpressed desire; one of the founding works of the linked short story collection in American literature.
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The Heptameron
by Marguerite de Navarre
The French Renaissance response to the Decameron — Marguerite de Navarre's 1559 frame narrative is explicitly modelled on Boccaccio, with ten nobles sheltering from floods and telling 72 tales; the most important direct imitation of the Decameron in European literature.
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
The contemporary novel set in the same medieval Italian world as the Decameron — Eco's monastery murder mystery draws on the same culture of scholastic theology, monastic politics, and humanist book culture that Boccaccio inhabited; the novel that brings the Decameron's world most fully to life for modern readers.
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Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
The Argentine short story collection that is the Decameron's most important literary heir — Borges's labyrinthine fictions share Boccaccio's delight in stories about stories, unreliable narrators, and the pleasures of pure narrative invention; the most influential short fiction writer of the 20th century in the Boccaccian tradition.
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All's Well That Ends Well
by William Shakespeare
One of three Shakespeare plays drawn from the Decameron — the plot of Helena and Bertram comes directly from Decameron Day 3, Tale 9 (Giletta of Narbonne); reading both versions reveals exactly what Shakespeare took from Boccaccio and what he transformed.
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