20th century distilled into 100 stories

Perhaps you’ve heard of Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” It’s a 14th-century allegorical work of 100 stories about many aspects of love and life.

That collection of tales is the inspiration for the tome “American Decameron” by Albuquerque’s Mark Dunn, a writer of 32 plays, a nonfiction author and a novelist widely known for his 2001 “Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters.”

It’s a tome because “American Decameron” has 762 pages.

	“American Decameron” by Mark Dunn MP Publishing, $24.95, 746 pp.

“I always give myself these challenges. This is the ultimate challenge because I wanted to write 100 stories, one for each year of the 20th century,” Dunn said in a phone interview.

“I said, ‘Don’t stop there, Mark.’ Since this is ‘American Decameron,’ it’s about snapshots of what is considered the American century. I decided to set at least one story in every state to be fair. … I wanted to be even-handed to all parts of the country.”

New Mexico is the setting of two stories. One is “Sequestered in New Mexico,” and the year is 1944. Dunn’s synopsis says “A married couple remembers the Manhattan Project as something both historically monumental and domestically challenging.”

The other story set in the Land of Enchantment is “Shelved in New Mexico”; the year is 1993. Dunn writes of it, “A young woman must put her life on hold to care for her mother. She isn’t alone.”

The author said there are synopses at the back of the book so readers can pick the stories that most interest them.

“I do have some favorites. I hate to say which ones they are because I don’t want to elevate one story above another,” Dunn said. “I will say, though, that it becomes a little difficult to pick favorites because I attempted to write in all different styles. They run the gamut of tone and mood.”

He sprinkled the book with recurring characters but also wanted stories that could easily stand alone and not be referenced to other stories.

Gale Hoyt, who is introduced in the first story in Texas, is revisited later, in 1925 in Williamsport, Pa. And in the epilogue she’s a nursing home resident.

Hoyt’s name is inspired by Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” which was also called “Prince Galehaut.”

Mark Dunn discusses, signs “American Decameron” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW. Actors also will read stories from the book.