A darkly fabulist story collection about women’s choices, complicity, and power and the lack thereof (with screen rights to the title story « Sinkhole » sold to Jordan Peele and Universal).
SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS
by Leyna Krow
Viking, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)
Credit: Young Kwak photo
From a genie, a devil, time travelers, a thief in peril, an oversized baby, an exploding woman, a woman with an impossible sinkhole in her yard, a woman who gives birth to a wild child, and more, this collection explores women in power – or in a deficit of power — to confront questions of complicity and intent, hysteria, paranoia, and what makes us whole in a world with relative values. With unsettling insight and echoes of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Laura van den Berg, SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS traces peripheral, upside down spaces in which sometimes there is a choice to be made, rules to be broken, risks to be tried, even crimes to be had, for the sake of a woman’s unconditional freedom.
Leyna Krow’s first collection I’M FINE, BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE SINKING (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel
Rooted in the small, mountain town of Dardan, Pennsylvania, where patriarch Jozef Vinich settled after surviving World War I, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES immerses us in the intimate lives of a family whose fierce bonds have been shaped by the great conflicts of the past century.
At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in northern California.
What comes first, the photograph or the memory? 
It’s 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and Pavitra wants a room with a view, a place where she will feel free and able to write the novel she began during her last year at a small college in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia. She has taken a job as a physics teacher at a wealthy private school and lives with the elderly mother of a local landlord whose rented apartments are just beyond her reach. The conversations with the people she encounters over the course of the next year, while she is in Optional Practical Training status (a visa category for international students who want to stay an additional twelve months after graduation), stir her awareness of assumptions—about who belongs and who does not—and categories both racial and cultural that barely registered in her earlier life, though now she finds them everywhere, including in herself.