Senaa Ahmad: The Age of Calamities (Holt, 2026) [IBR2026]

The initial spark was the idea of taking historical figures out of their well-known environments and putting them into unusual situations. But I was also interested in the larger-than-life quality of many historical figures. I wanted to play on the idea of what they represented in the cultural consciousness, if that makes sense, amplifying or undermining these well-known traits. I’ve always been drawn to formalist constraints: stories told in second person, in list form, as an audio transcript, etc. And when I started thinking about this collection, I realised I could use those types of constraints to ask how stories and histories were told, who was doing the telling, and what pieces were omitted. Senaa Ahmad, Interview with Well Read Women Back in 2022, I read Ahmad’s “Let’s Play Dead” in Pushcart XLVI; it was one of my favorites from that year. I noticed she was working on a story collection; I wrote, “That’s one I’m going to have to read.” That happened this year. It lived up to…