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Stories
by Senaa Ahmad
Book Reviewed by:Written by an inimitable new voice, The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories.
In this bold collection, Senaa Ahmad pushes the boundaries of history and its figures, sending the reader on a thrilling ride. In "Let's Play Dead," Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn gone, but there's a tiny problem―she keeps coming back to life no matter what he does. "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" hurls readers back to 1945, where they assume the role of a technician for the Manhattan Project, surrounded by labyrinthine paths and harrowing outcomes. And "Inside the House of the Historian" invites us to a dinner party turned murder mystery full of figures like Nefertiti, Queen Victoria, John Adams, and Marilyn Monroe. These stories and others entice readers to confront the past, the present, and themselves all at once. Zany and haunting, inviting and brilliant, each poignant tale delves into the surreal and tragicomic nature of the present through the lens of yesterday.
The Age of Calamities is an evocation of life and death on history's unsteady margins, of how to reckon with the blunt-force trauma of ill-fated times. Fiercely clever and wildly inventive, this debut establishes Senaa Ahmad as a literary force.
LET'S PLAY DEAD
There was a man, let's call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let's call her Anne B. Let's give them a castle and make it nice. Let's give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let's give him a fussy way of being. Let's make her smart and sneaky, because it's such a mean thing to do.
Let's make it so she can't escape. Just for fun.
Let's seal the bottle, and shake it, and shake until our hands fall off.
* * *
IT TAKES TWO swings to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn't happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but it's a touch long-winded, and no one's paying him any attention. And she's dead, so it's especially beside the point.
The ministers dither in the courtyard, venturing their last looks, murmuring, Exquisite, just exquisite. She is so beautiful, they agree, even beheaded.
Henry will ...
Ahmad's approach in The Age of Calamities is similar to that of Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth, where all of history exists in a curious in-between state: the Antrobus family simultaneously lives in mid-century America and at the start of the Ice Age, with Mr. Antrobus inventing primitive devices like the lever from the comfort of his modern circa-1942 home. There are some stories where this approach works better than others. "Inside the House of the Historian" is goofy fun—wouldn't you want to see John Adams and Nefertiti engage in dinnertime banter?—but it doesn't run much deeper than that. But when The Age of Calamities works, it's difficult to shake off. The best stories in the collection are generally the more horror-oriented ones, such as "The Wolves," a grim tale of lycanthropy in the heyday of the Mongol Empire...continued
Full Review
(599 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Claire Oshetsky, award-winning author of Evil Genius and Chouette
Senaa Ahmad's stories are a wonder. Her prose is wild, incantatory, upending. Each turn of the page surprised me anew, and carried me off in completely unexpected directions―what a delight! Kelly Link, award-winning author of The Book of Love and White Cat, Black Dog
Senaa Ahmad's stories are dazzlingly inventive...These stories make it clear how ancient history and myths still linger in contemporary life―but also propose the radical possibility that we may yet escape or alter old patterns and old wounds."Choose Your Own Apocalypse" is a delightful name for a story all on its own; doubly clever when you learn it's about the Manhattan Project. But author Senaa Ahmad isn't making use of the Choose Your Own Adventure format for the sake of cheap juxtaposition. Sure, the real J. Robert Oppenheimer didn't become an eldritch abomination due to the corrosive force of the bomb (as far as we know), but Ahmad's approach—specifically, the fact that there is no good ending—reinforces the malefic influence of the Manhattan Project. It's a canny reflection of the fact that, to quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."
The story comes downwind of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's zeitgeist-capturing 2023 film about the father ...
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