And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-American literary scholar, Guggenheim fellow, and Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, edited this early pandemic anthology, whose title borrows the closing line of Dante’s Inferno—the moment when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to behold the beauty of the heavens once more. The collection gathers essayistic and diaristic responses to COVID-19 from fifty-two contributors across more than thirty countries and languages, organised into five sections whose headings are themselves drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Unlike The Decameron Project, which commissioned fiction, this anthology is closer to life writing: personal essays, journal entries, letters, poems, photographs, and artwork composed during the first weeks and months of lockdown, each rooted in a particular city and a particular experience of confinement. Jhumpa Lahiri writes a letter to Italy from Rome; Mario Vargas Llosa meditates on whether the pandemic marks a return to the Middle Ages; Ariel Dorfman confronts the virus in a Chile already convulsed by political revolt; and an ER doctor in Queens narrates the long jog home after thirteen-hour shifts.

The anthology’s significance lies in its scale and its multilingual, transnational scope, which maps directly onto the Pandemic Stories project’s interest in how lockdown diaries cross national and linguistic borders. It is also a useful resource for identifying individual entries to propose for the archive in the future, since many of the contributors—Lahiri, Vargas Llosa, Dorfman, Naja Marie Aidt—are established literary figures whose pandemic writing has not yet been indexed. Stavans frames the collection as evidence that the pandemic, unlike the 1918 influenza, generated an immediate outpouring of literary response, a question central to the archive’s research agenda. A Kirkus starred review described the book as a prism reflecting outrage, fear, and bewilderment while also capturing small joys. The anthology thus functions both as a primary source—a curated corpus of transnational pandemic life writing—and as a secondary one, offering an implicit argument about why this crisis, unlike earlier ones, compelled so many writers to bear witness in real time.