“Maybe if I’d been better at basketball or drawing cartoons or discovering oil or being an enlightened Don Juan, I wouldn’t have felt the need to play so long and hard at my keyboard. The simpler, more honest explanation may be that they made me take touch typing in junior high school and what else could I do?”
Smudgeworks Press publishes the work of Andrew Amster. Amster’s stories and poems are both grounded and funny. They speak to life’s ability to bewilder all of us with unpredictable joys and heartaches, victories interspersed with pratfalls, accolades and “kick me” signs.
Here are two excerpts from reviews of Amster’s first novel, Raised by Wolves:
“Amster totally captures the tone of an adolescent girl. Raised by Wolves is one of those books where putting it down to eat was an intrusion. The dialogue is delightful! Looking forward to more from this talented writer.”
“Amster is witty and has somehow gotten into the mind of these teens. He captures the social scene in the school cafeteria and the conversations between the friends brilliantly.”
Andrew Amster was born in Lexington, Kentucky where he mostly survived a mostly conventional upbringing. He was accepted into a creative writing program as a college freshman. This took less than a single semester to prove ridiculous; he had yet to do anything in his life and so had nothing to write about. Predictably, this lead to his professors calling his poems “didactic” and his short stories “melodramatic horseshit.” They were not wrong.