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In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, writers were racing to produce timely accounts, with texts that ranged from reported narratives to poems and short pieces that resembled spontaneous snapshots more than well-thought-out compositions. Short texts that cannot necessarily be assigned to a single genre but that fit well into an anthology seem to be the trend, as some quickly published anthologies on COVID-19 show. [...] Above all in France, the "journal du confinement", or "confinement diary" - or "corona diary", as I will call it in the following - became highly popular as a genre during the pandemic. This phenomenon seems to have been not only international in scope but represented in various media. As a new genre, the corona diary emerged at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, following in the footsteps of two traditional literary branches. First, it had a strong affinity with the literary serial: published as different instalments in newspapers or as video and audio on the internet, the corona diary can be seen as following in this tradition, which until recently was threatened with extinction. As a serial work - and as a quickly written text published in a newspaper - the corona diary can be understood as a revival of this phenomenon, even if its episodes do not build on each other in a linear fashion and therefore need not necessarily be read one after the other. Secondly, the "diary" genre has been undergoing a revival. [...] This genre seems to have spread most quickly at the beginning of the pandemic in the francophone context in particular. Examples include Wajdi Mouawad's corona diary, published on YouTube and SoundCloud, Leïla Slimani's publications in Le Monde, and Marc Lambron's contributions to Le Journal du Dimanche. Although there are a few examples of German-language quick-response literature centered on the pandemic, the corona diary would seem to be a largely neglected genre in the German-language context. [...] One exception in this regard is the work of Thomas Glavinic, whose texts were published in the daily newspaper Welt. Described as a serial novel, the contributions constitute more of a diary than a novel, as I aim to show.
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