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5/16/00
Summer Reading 101
It's rare that a book stops us dead in our tracks.
It's even more rare when a book has us on page 33 before
we've realized that we're standing like a moron on the
subway platform and three trains have passed us by.
Enter Sam the Cat (Random House), Matthew Klam's
debut collection of short stories which hits stores today.
Excerpted in The New Yorker, given raves in Elle,
Harper's Bazaar, and Jane, the 243-page collection of
gritty short stories is the most riveting thing we've picked
up in some time. (The book jacket's darn pretty, too).
You're probably all too familiar with the men Klam writes
aboutÑyou're either dating one of them, are one of them,
or are pretending NOT to be one of them. They fetishize
women's private parts, philander shamelessly, screw up a
best friend's wedding . . . They're the self-admitted
"original hopeless lover(s)"—complicated, sex-obsessed,
and pathetic. But they're somehow sweet (and they know
love, they really do! See page 126!).
What redeems it all is Klam's writing: a voice that is
remarkably dead-on, crass yet poetic, never frilly, funny,
self-mocking and profoundly human.
After all, how many writers can write "she threw her
tongue down his throat like a waterlogged sneaker" and get
away with it?
(But lest you get too excited, the first story has already
been optioned by Cameron Crowe's production company).
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