The Age of Calamities - by Senaa Ahmad (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For fans of Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado, The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories.

In this bold and enchanting collection Senaa Ahmad takes license with history and its players, 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 surreal nature of today through the lens of yesterday, charting the tragicomic yet hopeful act of living.

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.

Review Quotes

"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!"
--Claire Oshetsky, award-winning author of Evil Genius and Chouette

"Anne Boleyn's head whispers to her body from across the room; a village of Napoleons squabble in a broken-down house; a historian's home slowly fills with water; a young woman hosts an apocalypse-themed dinner party, where guests choose their endings from a menu: if reality is finally destroyed here, what Senaa Ahmad builds from the wreckage just might be more gorgeous, more crazy, and more necessary, than the world we've left behind."
--Ben Marcus, award-winning author of Notes from the Fog and The Flame Alphabet

About the Author

Senaa Ahmad's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere. She has received the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Speculative Literature Foundation, and the Carl Brandon Society's Octavia Butler Scholarship. Her work was also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction. The Age of Calamities is her first book.