A Hole in the Story
“A cunning writer with masterful timing and an outrageous sense of humor.”—Gary Shteyngart
An irreverent, darkly comic novel dissecting the misjudgments, hypocrisies, and occasional good motives that drive our politics and our journalism, as well as our most intimate personal relations.
At his desk one day, prominent Washington commentator Adam Zweig receives a text message. “Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news,” it reads. “Call soonest.” These are the early rumblings of an eventual media storm generated by small-town reporter Valerie Iovine, who has gone public with her account of sexual harassment at the hands of esteemed editor and liberal icon Max Lieberthol. Twenty years have passed since the incident, and though Adam wasn’t directly involved, he quickly finds himself implicated and entangled, his career under imminent threat.
Adam has never forgotten his history with Valerie: as former colleagues, their workplace collaboration had gradually tipped into a mutual romantic attraction. Or so he believed. Confronted by the claims against his former boss and a growing awareness of rampant sexism in his industry, Adam, who had always thought of himself as progressive, is forced to challenge his own assumptions over the years. What once seemed incidental becomes sinister; what once seemed like a blundering encounter helped derail a young woman’s promising career.
Sly and ironic, A Hole in the Story explores one imperfect man’s dilemmas as he tries to keep his feet in a shifting moral landscape.
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Ken Kalfus
Ken Kalfus has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and he has received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Praise and Prizes
You Might Enjoy
From “an important writer in every sense” (David Foster Wallace), a novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America’s young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world.
These stories mine a vast terrain of geography and metaphor, sketching portraits of people caught in the seismic collision of cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired. Witty and fantastical, hip and wise, this first collection by a…
One of America’s great contemporary writers—called “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life” by the New York Times—serves up tales at once hair-raising, comic, and fabulous. From a nuclear power plant worker to the first cosmonaut, this…
In this modern classic, the charges of a young Sioux woman force David Hayden’s father, the sheriff of their small town, to confront his older brother, a charming war hero and respected doctor. This novel is an astonishing tale of love and courage…
