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`Who is Rich? Is a tantalizing novel - acute and smart and stark, but mostly it´s unrelentingly funny about a large number of very inappropriate things. It´s one of those rare books: you open it, then you´re up all night. I was` Richard Ford Every summer, a once-sort-of famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a class at a week-long arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. It´s a place where drum circles happen on the beach at midnight, clothing optional. Rich finds himself worrying about his family´s nights without him, his back taxes, his stuttering career and his own very real desire for love and human contact. One of the attendees this year is a forty-one-year-old painting student named Amy O´Donnell. Amy is a mother of three, unhappily married to a brutish Wall Street titan who commutes to work via helicopter. Rich and Amy met at the conference a year ago, shared a moment of passion, then spent the winter exchanging inappropriate texts and emails and counting the days until they could see each other again. Now they´re back. Who Is Rich? is a warped and exhilarating tale of love and lust, a study in midlife alienation, erotic pleasure, envy, and bitterness in the new gilded age that goes far beyond humour and satire to address deeper questions: of family, monogamy, the intoxicating beauty of children and the challenging interdependence of two soulful, sensitive creatures in a confusing domestic alliance.

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Matthew Klam, 36, wurde 1999 vom "New Yorker" zu einem der 20 besten jungen Autoren Amerikas gewählt. Als die Titelgeschichte "Sam the Cat" - nach heftigen redaktionsinternen Debatten - vor einiger Zeit im "New Yorker" erschien, wurde Klam über Nacht zum Nachwuchsstar der amerikanischen Literaturszene. Für eine seiner Erzählungen aus dem vorliegenden Debüt erhielt er den renommierten O´Henry-Award. Matthew Klam lebt mit seiner Ehefrau in Washington, D.C. Er schreibt für "The New York Times Magazine" und "Harper´s".

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