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".

`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.

A struggling cartoonist heads for a week every year to teach an arts class in New England, encountering one year the unhappily married wife of a brutish CEO there. The two have been looking forward to reuniting when they converge on the town again, in this study in midlife alienation, bitterness, family and monogamy.