A Hole in the Story - Hardcover

by Ken Kalfus (Author)

A Library Journal Best Book of 2025

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

A Kirkus Starred Review

"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.

Author Biography

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. He is the author of four novels, including 2 A.M. in Little America and Equilateral, and has published three short story collections. He has written for the New York Times, Harper's, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books and his books have been translated into more than ten foreign languages. Born in New York, Kalfus currently resides in Philadelphia.