The end of a year and the start of the next are often times for reflection, rumination, and looking for new directions. Senaa Ahmad’s collection of short stories, The Age of Calamities, was the last book I finished in 2025, which seemed an auspicious choice to close out the year. As I turned the pages from story to story, I wondered whether revisiting various historical figures and their calamitous times would glean any insight for tackling our own disorderly times.
Ahmad’s stories use historical figures and their settings to enact a sort of dollhouse playing experience. Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Ibn Battuta are just a few of the historical characters who feature as Ahmad’s playthings. She places her chosen selection of characters at dinner parties located outside of time, in “will they/won’t they” romantic arcs that span from Ancient Rome to late 19th-century New York City, and in boarding houses at the edge of town where a handful of different Napoleons reside.
Each part of the collection is filled to the brim with the absurd, and each story’s direction is difficult to predict from one page to the next. However, some common themes emerge from Ahmad’s writing: violence against women and how men transform themselves to commit that violence, confronting grief that lingers in the body and the world around, and houses with constantly shifting structures that act as their own characters.
Ahmad’s creativity in portraying the cycles of violence and abuses of power by men shines brightest in two particular stories. In “Let’s Play Dead,” Henry VIII struggles to execute his wife, Anne Boleyn. With every attempt to kill her, Anne Boleyn returns to life with a vibrancy that keeps her hoping that her husband will realize the pointlessness of this constant cycle of harm. In “The Wolves,” Genghis Khan’s men transform into wolves and leave a trail of death and destruction behind throughout Persia. A group of women from the same community band together to survive and wait out the cycle of the moon, since the full moon is the one time of the month that the wolves will change back into men. The women are forced to reckon with familiar faces from their lives, men from their community, committing acts of terror against them. Once back in their human form, the men refuse to contend with the violence they committed as wolves. Their denial and inability to comprehend their own actions leave the women almost relieved when the men become monsters again, and the cognitive dissonance has passed.
In many of the stories, Ahmad often has the narrator speak directly to the reader. Sometimes, she’ll introduce deliberate trickery to toy with how the narrator recalls the event. In “The Wolves,” the narrator confuses the reader about how many women fled the destruction caused by the wolves and who died first in her group. Ahmad also frequently plays with the order of events in a story, telling them backwards or in disarray. In this jumbled order, the narrator will argue back and forth with the reader on the page about why this particular detail is included or what the reader demands to know from this story. Amid the many twists and turns in each story, this direct, sustained engagement from the narrator was an interesting way to keep the reader’s focus as other zany sections appeared on the page.
The most metafictional story of the collection, “The Houseguest,” features an award-winning actress portraying Lizzie Borden in an iconic slasher franchise while a ghostly houseguest regularly visits her home. The actress and other members of the production team joke about the screenwriter feeling briefly haunted by a ghost before penning the movie script. The actress argues that the Lizzie Borden she portrays is only a fictional character rather than based on the actual historical figure, but it’s a story that acts as a sort of Russian nesting doll—Ahmad is an artist portraying another artist who is portraying a historical figure and taking liberties with depicting them in a variety of situations. Included closer to the end, this story added another unique element to the sprawling themes within the collection
In her writing, Ahmad does not bother to explain in detail the process of how a houseful of identical-looking Napoleons are all birthed at the age of 29 in the same town or how Joan of Arc came to cling to the body of a cleaning woman on the run. Instead, Ahmad is incredibly descriptive in capturing the ornate details of a dining room in a house that can move on its own. The summer heat in New York City is written as a wrathful god in “Not Everything is Ancient History” and receives more attention on the page than the contrast of Ancient Roman soldiers meandering in Midtown Manhattan. Her literary choices about when to employ her flower descriptions and when to state things plainly allow the reader to quickly move past the anachronism of Julius Caesar struggling to connect with stunt girl journalist Nellie Bly. Instead, the reader is asked to push further and absorb the story as a whole. This choice of where to place her more lurid descriptions also allows her to introduce a great deal of whimsy into the text. While writing about terror, fear, and grisly murder, her tone is often light enough to maintain a playful sense of macabre rather than stranding the reader in the morose and morbid. This choice in where to place more lurid descriptions also allows Ahmad to introduce a fair amount of whimsy into the text.
Although Ahmad’s stories are not an attempt at any kind of historical accuracy, her interest in playing dolls with historical figures and old tragedies left me with certain curiosities. What will today’s calamities and tragedies inspire future literary flirtations with historical figures? As this book closed out my year, and perhaps opens the next one for readers, I considered the year as a whole—not how I feel about it now, but how I might feel about it one hundred or so years from now with someone else at the helm to tell their story.
FICTION
The Age of Calamities
By Senaa Ahmad
Henry Holt and Co.
Published January 13, 2026
