The day on which Adolf Hitler raided Ellen Koch's basement laundry on the Upper West Side was a cold, sunny autumn day, and he began by giving her a dressing-down. This is how the story of the seemingly droll old washerwoman Ellen Koch begins - and it is also the prelude to Matussek's debut as a story teller. The scenes, destinies and musical keys of these stories could hardly be more multifaceted and multicoloured: the story of Jim Dole, for example, the last cayuse who is the administrator of the legacy of his ancestors in the Green Springs reserve - until the day when he runs amok. Then there is the tourists' stronghold in Mexico which is almost the downfall of a stewardess, and young dealers who have some dramatic experiences in an Indian prison. There is a piece about the life of class-war-conscious affluent society kids in Germany in the 1970s, and a cameo drama about a German split - of a private kind - in the east and west. And again and again: New York, the glittering, desolate, challenging city of New York as the backdrop for an intellectual party, for a young woman who is waiting for her death sentence, and for a taxi driver who does not hold with keeping his views on life to himself. Matussek writes the sort of metropolitan literature, elegant and flexible, that we admire in American authors.

Matussek made these reportages during a time of radical change - the end of the Reagan/Bush era and Clinton's first year of presidency. The national intoxication with the success of the Gulf War was followed by a hangover in the face of America's home-made problems: the economic crisis, the financial deficit, the street fights in Los Angeles. The stuff of which the American dream is made is worn-out and shabby, but these Stories from America make it clear that it still remains the accepted point of reference. A celebration of the great colonial myth. The basketball-playing ghetto boy who hopes for a big career. The media mogul who conquers continents in the »war of pictures«. And Matussek shows us how the artist and the critic handle this »stuff that dreams are made on«. Cocktail parties and homeless desolation, Broadway fever, the intoxication of consumption and the death sentence of aids – New York, America, has seldom been so intensively experienced as it is here. Linguistic brilliance, wit and an unerring feeling for unexpected details characterise Matussek's impressive and provocative writing.