Daphne Kalotay's Calamity and Other Stories dishes up everyday lives with precise nuance and realistic texture. These lives are ordinary in the best sense – complex and durable – whether it be a teenager in a high school French class with a teacher who doesn't exactly teach French, a woman who runs into her ex-husband on Bleeker Street and ends up bedding him fifteen years after a divorce, or a piano teacher named Cole Curtin who closes his eyes to play Scarlatti at a picnic. Summary doesn't remotely do justice to the stories nor does it indicate what small and beautifully realized dips into the plainspoken and melancholy cold clear lake of understanding they turn out to be.
The exercise in a story by Kalotay is always about making sense, coming to, fashioning some sort of revelation from the incongruent bits that life offers up. Written in traditional prose and sparely elegant in style, these stories trace the subtle confrontation of characters' circumstances and ambiguities. This is fiction that delves into the private, shuttered thoughts of those struggling to cross and re-cross into the country of what is known; these are stories about the ordinary ways we deal, get by, and fashion a life. In "Anniversary," for instance, "Even now Eileen is often amazed by what it means, for so many people, to keep living: to awake each morning startled by alarm clocks, to stir spirals into coffee and shove feet into shoes. She has puzzled over the fact of so much accumulated time spent licking stamps, moving trash from one place to another, storing summer clothes and unfolding winter ones. Kitchen sponges, magazine subscriptions, doctor's appointments, birthday cards, nail clippers, checkbooks. When she chose to live, that day at the hospital ten years ago, she knew that her decision meant, as much as anything all these things."

In "All Life's Grandeur," a teenage boy endures a summer friendship with a much younger girl as he trudges through a boring season at a lake under the gaze of his father and father's girlfriend. "Valerie showed up at the cottage every day, and Dad and Shirley were always there to smile and nod and make sure that I joined her. Here I was, ready for my first summer romance, saddled with an eleven-year-old who for all I knew still believed in Santa Claus. Though my romantic fantasies were embarrassingly ignorant (even after what I'd learned in science class, the most I could imagine was a prolonged kiss, unaware of the fact that tongues were involved), they made no allowances for preteens. I pictured myself with some big-breasted girl, walking hand in hand to buy ice cream, licking from each other's cones. Instead I had scrawny Valerie. We swam, canoed, and played cards on the old dock, which Valerie preferred to the communal one she and her neighbors shared in Hanlam's Bay. She showed me the cool, shady area behind her parents' place where she dug for worms, and we went fishing regularly."
Daphne Kalotay writes beautiful, astute stories, where depth is the norm, compassion the rendering and poetic detail the final punctuating image. The writing is lucid and lyrical as in the story "Difficult Thoughts" where a woman doing research in Florence meets two brothers escaping the responsibilities of their own lives, "They waited with me as the elevator creaked up to their floor, and I stepped into the compartment for a last time. Through the gilt bars, I watched Massi bring a lit match to the tip of his cigarette. He looked pensive as ever. ‘It's a shame you have to go,’ he said, exhaling. ‘You really should stay.’ The smoke from this cigarette wrote some flimsy, short-lived message in the air."