Steven Amsterdam discusses and signs his book: Things We Didn't See Coming February 18, 2010

Michael Williams, in Melbourne’s The Age, wrote of this award-winning, dazzling debut collection, “By turns horrific and beautiful . . . Humanity at its most fractured and desolate . . . Often moving, frequently surprising, even blackly funny . . . Things We Didn’t See Coming is terrific.” This is just one of the many rave reviews that appeared on the Australian publication of these nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar.
Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, the stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming increasingly savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In each story we see that, despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity—and humor.

Steven Amsterdam is a native New Yorker who moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2003. He currently works as a psychiatric nurse.