Disasters

You can look at French art of the 1870s and momentarily forget about the Franco–Prussian War and the Paris Commune. You can study the paintings of Picasso and Matisse between 1914 and 1918 and tentatively put aside the grim fact of the Great War. You cannot for a moment, however, look at avant-garde art of the Weimar Republic and see it apart from the wider cataclysm that was brewing. This

Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming presents a hybrid fiction - even the blurbs at the front of the book alternately call its contents both "stories" and a "novel". Neither term is entirely accurate. While the nine sections comprising the work can be read as discrete stories, they are enriched by points of convergence and a shared context. And context is everything in Amsterdam's b