It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.

The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.

In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.

"Something very strange happens upon finishing Steven Amsterdam's (remarkably assured and kind of masterful) stories: what should be a bum trip through a variety of dystopias – foodless worlds; heartless periods of ceaseless rain and savagery; breakouts of peace and plenty marked by venality and ambition; biblical pestilence and illness – ends up anything but; one puts down the book feeling something close to hope. Perhaps it's the life-is-long, cyclical wisdom of it all, maybe it's a new-found appreciation for the Here And Now, although I'm inclined to think it's just gratitude that there are such writers around." -David Rakoff

www.stevenamsterdam.com