Sam the Cat: and Other Stories

"I love being in love. I'm so in love, I'm so in love. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm in love with. I'm in love with the love drug. You walk into a supermarket or a restaurant, your girlfriend goes in first and you're looking at her ass. And you say to yourself, 'Isn't that the most beautiful ass? That's mine. It's beautiful.' Like it's going to save you. An ass isn't going to save you. What's it going to do? Hide you from the police? Call up your boss when you don't feel well?"

Like a performance artist in print, Matthew Klam stands up here and delivers hilarious, shocking, high-energy riffs on the theme of modern love and all its complexities. One by one, these stories amuse, enlighten, and entertain. As a group, they mark the full emergence of one of America's foremost young literary talents.
        
In the immediately engrossing title story, Samuel Beardson falls in love with a young woman across a crowded room who, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a bird-boned, longhaired, slim fellow named John Drake. In a single moment, "Sam the Cat" enters a sexual twilight zone, and a young man's cocksure, womanizing lifestyle unravels: "There I am, horned out and at the same time queasy with the weirdness of it."
        
In "The Royal Palms," Klam's overworked, newly monied hero walks out of a Caribbean resort casino with a pile of cash stuffed into his T-shirt. Beside him stands his wife, Diane, furious at herself for the cellulite that's recently appeared on her thighs. Their marriage is at a sexual standstill. Then the sound of an old jeep spooks them, and the next moment they are running for their lives.
        
Having fallen in love with his girlfriend Phylida's beautiful behind, the narrator of "Issues I Dealt With in Therapy" has flown to a Nantucket-like island with her for a wedding. He's been asked to toast the groom, once a well-intentioned civil rights lawyer who's grown into a sweating "Gore-guy," a self-absorbed power pol, a hot, young, curry-barfing bulimic on his way to the White House. Phylida, meanwhile, is a sleepless, hypochondriacal medical resident. Among this cast of frank and foolish characters, we're left to wonder if we have any control over whom we love.
        
Matthew Klam is an O. Henry Award winner, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and his generation's most on-key singer of the boy-girl blues. The stories in Sam the Cat crackle with humor, intelligence, and style and add up to an outrageous, entirely original, and unforgettable debut.

"I loved Sam the Cat. What a great collection. The stories are brilliantly constructed. They make me laugh. Très slanky."    
--Alice Elliott Dark

Matthew Klam lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife. In 1999 he was named one of the twenty best young fiction writers in America by The New Yorker. He is an O. Henry Award winner. His nonfiction has been featured in such places as Harper's and The New York Times Magazine.