Who is Rich?

Matthew Klam was named one of the twenty best fiction writers in America under 40 by The New Yorker. He's a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, and an O Henry Award. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in the category of first fiction, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and by the Borders for their New Voices series. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, GQ Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire and Hollins College, and has taught creative writing in many places including Johns Hopkins University, St. Albans School, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden.

'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.

'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