A debut teeming with strange delights.
The past comes to unexpected, vivid life in these speculative short stories.
History repeats itself, goes the famous saying by Karl Marx, first as tragedy, then as farce. If that’s true, then the characters in these off-kilter, even madcap, pieces of historical fiction, caught in the strange loops and eddies of speculative time, may have passed beyond both tragedy and farce into an altogether unnamable place. In the show-stopping opening story, Anne Boleyn, à la Groundhog Day, comes back to life after every attempted assassination by Henry VIII (“Let’s Play Dead”). Joan of Arc repeatedly inhabits the sleeping body of housekeeper Claribel in 1926, Joan bent on revenge and Claribel on annihilation after a series of losses leaves her hollowed out (“Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune”). In the grimly playful finale, readers take a young female scientist working closely with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project through choices like “To approach the oversized lungs, turn to…” in a surreal choose-your-own-adventure story (“Choose Your Own Apocalypse”). If all this sounds rather bonkers, it is. Ahmad swings for the fences by taking unusual premises—what if many Napoleons rented a house together? What if Nellie Bly met Julius Caesar?—and drives into left field with surreal and speculative plot turns, like talking crows or werewolves that turn into men on the full moon. Doubling down on this weirdness can feel like a hall of mirrors—just as readers settle into a story’s reality, they bump into more illusions. But more often than this effect frustrates, it enchants, and it helps that Ahmad is exceptional at the sentence level: “The heat of July has the wrath of an old god,” reads one description of a New York City summer; thistle grows “in vengeful bursts around the yard.”
A debut teeming with strange delights.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781250378477
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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