About the imprint

Lives we think we already know.

Getting to know someone changes what we are able to see in them.

Amici is Italian for "friends," and it is the truest word we know for how readers feel about certain people. We cheer for them, argue about them, quote them at dinner, and defend them to strangers. Some of them have been gone a long time, which has not slowed anyone down.

Our subjects are saints, athletes, and musicians. What they share is not a genre. It is you: each one is someone you already feel you know. You are not wrong about that. You are just not finished.

So we write independent, unauthorized biographies that go back to the record and look for the person standing behind the legend. That person is usually funnier, stranger, and more stubborn than the statue, and much better company.

The method is simple and a little old-fashioned. Earlier voices come first. Later memory is labeled as memory. Sources are named, so you can check our work. And we never invent intimacy: no imagined thoughts, no made-up dialogue, no scenes nobody saw.

None of that is the point, though. The point is the moment you look up from the page and say, "I had no idea," and then go right back to loving them, only a little more accurately.

Meet the author, Allan S. Martin.

Press: Lindsay Moore · Lindsay@AmiciBooks.com · Instagram · @amicibooks