News
March, 2025
Book Launch Hole in the Story
A Hole in the Story launches Tuesday, April 1! I'll be reading, answering questions, and signing books at Barnes & Noble, 1708 Chestnut St., Philadelphia. The program starts at 6pm.
February, 2025
Publishers weekly A Hole in the Story
Link: Advance Review
n Kalfus’s resonant latest (after 2 A.M. in Little America), a political reporter reflects on the Clinton years during a present-day sexual harassment scandal. When Adam Zweig receives news that his former boss Max Lieberthol, a legend in the liberal establishment, has been “#MeToo’d,” he initially pleads ignorance to a reporter before reflecting back 30 years earlier, when he was a young staff writer at the magazine Next Deal under the charismatic Lieberthol’s stewardship. The accuser, Valerie Lovine, was a Next Deal freelancer at the time and a close friend of Adam’s. In flashbacks, Kalfus reveals that Valerie told Adam about the assault soon after it happened, and that Adam offered comfort but took no action against Max. Later, Adam and Valerie have a brief and awkward affair. As Adam considers the contemporaneous events of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, he questions whether he was as enlightened about gender relations as he’d thought. The insights are subtle, as Kalfus writes with economical prose and avoids polemics even as Adam’s soul-searching leads to devastating honesty, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. This is sobering. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Apr.)
Kirkus A Hole in the Story
Link: Starred Advance Review
An edgy, discomfiting look at the alpha males of journalism in the age of #MeToo.
Adam Zweig is a successful political writer in Washington, the veteran of a thousand think pieces. He’s in his late 50s, divorced, a man of regular habits. So, when he’s messaged by a young reporter on the trail of a D.C. mediasphere sexual-harassment scandal, the alarm bells tripped aren’t the loud and blaring kind. Mainly, he feels sorrow—the accused is Max Lieberthol, years ago Adam’s editor and mentor at a magazine that resembles the New Republic. Adam, a good progressive, initially hits a morally tutting tone (how could Max have been foolish and vain enough to proposition a staffer?), but there’s sympathy underneath. He’s disappointed, but he wonders: A story like this, about an offense two decades old, committed in a kind of prelapsarian boys-will-be-boys era by an aging lion whose magazine has always had a big reputation, but (after all) a small readership—even in the age of social media, what legs can such a story have? Then—and Kalfus masterfully persuades us that the withholding is not reader-deception but self-deception—Adam begins to recall and recount the context. The accuser, Valerie Iovine, was his closest friend in the office, and Adam was present, outside Max’s office, when the incident occurred; Valerie told Adam about it immediately afterward, and he helped to console her. Adam feels duty-bound to confirm that Valerie is telling the truth, and this—he wants us and himself and most of all Valerie to believe—is an act of characteristic rectitude. The book’s steadily mounting tension derives from what comes next, as circumstance and Valerie herself require him to excavate more thoroughly his relationship with her, a friendship that grew into a professional intimacy and that then (in Adam’s way of seeing it) turned briefly romantic soon before—this having nothing to do with him!—Valerie withdrew from Washington and disappeared into the exile of small-city journalism.
A taut, uncomfortable look at a man forced into a reckoning that’s much more personal than he’d like.
A Hole in the Story
Reviews Ken Kalfus
For all reviews, click on the book at left.
A Hole in the Story Preorder
A Hole in the Story is now available for preorder. You can get it directly from the publisher, Milkweed Editions or any online bookseller, or ask for it at your favorite bricks-and-mortar establishment.
January, 2025
Falls Library
First reading of the year! At the Falls of Schuylkill Library, Saturday, January 18, at 3 PM. I'll be reading from my most recent novel, 2 A.M. in Little America. I'll also discuss writing and reading in general and my next book, A Hole in the Story.
December, 2024
Announcing A Hole in the Story
My fifth novel, A Hole in the Story, has reached the stores. In a starred advance review, Kirkus calls it "an edgy, discomfiting look at the alpha males of journalism in the age of #MeToo."
April, 2024
Palace Fortress
In my new short story for the Baffler, "Palace-Fortress," a former revolutionary appears to accept his grim fate as he ends a late-night dinner with the nation's dictator.
September, 2023
Distopia America, conversation with Giancarlo de Cataldo
At the Mantova Literary Festival, "Distopia America," a conversation with Giancarlo de Cataldo.