Big Swinging

(Hardback)

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From "one of America's great living writers" (Jonathan Safran Foer), a prescient, high-stakes novel dissecting the ways we tell stories-privately and publicly-amid radical social change.

At his desk one day, prominent Washington journalist 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 initiated by fellow journalist 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, entangled, and ultimately questioning his moral, personal, and professional standing.

For Adam has a history with Valerie: as former colleagues, their workplace collaboration gradually tipped into flirtation, and then into mutual passion. Or so he thought. Confronted by the actions of 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 cast a critical light on his own assumptions and behaviors over the years. What once seemed incidental becomes sinister; what then seemed like a casual encounter in truth played a part in derailing a young woman's promising career.

Fascinating, tense, and scrutinous, Big Swinging is a close-quarters account of our changing media landscape, and what happens when one finds oneself on the wrong side of an awakening.

Reviews

Praise for Ken Kalfus

Ken Kalfus is an important writer in every sense of important. There are hip, funny writers, and there are smart, technically innovative writers, and there are wise, moving, and profound writers. Kalfus is all these at once.David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest

Kalfus himself is more shaman than politicianeven when his stories rub up against geopolitical borders, he takes to the spiritual and dissolves them into magic.Newsday

Kalfus reminds us that the short story is not an easily contained form, a single thing done in a single way [. . .] [He] lights his stories with this fundamental strangeness. . . . No one is comfortable in Kalfuss universe, and no one is ever exactly at home.New York Times

Kalfus unerringly recognizes the comedy inherent in our quandaries of knowing and being, and suggests that laughter best quenches existential thirst.Philadelphia Inquirer

Praise for 2 A.M. in Little America

Deeply intriguing [. . .] A tense and often beautiful work of reflection on the American present [. . .] 2 A.M. in Little America is a highly readable, taut novel. It pulls the reader into its world, and suggests that many interesting human complications await us at the end of the story called the United States of America.New York Times Book Review

Kalfus has a gift for penetrating to the core of current events and presenting issues in a provocative way . . . [2 A.M. in Little America is] a quietly dystopian novel that presents an unsettling portrait of a humbled America as seen through the eyes of a migrant who is a not entirely reliable narrator.Washington Post

Kalfus is one of contemporary literatures best-kept secrets. Hes a writers writer through and through, but with 2 A.M. in Little America, hes poised to make a major crossover to the mainstream . . . Kalfus explores powerful questions about tribalization, alienation, and exile.Esquire

"A dystopian novel with a timely premise [. . .] To put down the book, to re-immerse in the onrushing news stream of our raucous times, is sometimes to feel the world of 2 A.M. in Little America encroaching on real life. A coup attempt, a jaw-slackening probe of the event with intimations another could be on the way, mass shootingswhat fresh horror will pop up on our screens Is it time to get out"Washington Post Magazine

From the undersung Kalfus, another tonally intricate triumph, this one about the bewilderment, alienation, and sheer strangeness of being a refugee [. . .] A strange, highly compelling tale about what happens when American privilege and insulation get turned inside out.Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Author Bio

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.