The House in Baiting Hollow : Short Stories

Set between the multiethnic neighborhoods of New York City and the equally layered landscapes of Makhno’s native Halychyna region of Ukraine, the stories in Vasyl Makhno’s The House in Baiting Hollow follow immigrants and exiles, survivors and dreamers, who carry anxieties shaped by displacement and histories that refuse to stay buried.

In this luminous and quietly unsettling collection of short stories, Vasyl Makhno moves across continents, generations, and inner lives to explore what it means to belong—and what it costs to remember. Set between the multiethnic neighborhoods of New York City and the equally layered landscapes of Makhno’s native Halychyna region of Ukraine, these stories uncover unexpected echoes between past and present, old worlds and new. Immigrants and exiles, survivors and dreamers, carry anxieties shaped by displacement and histories that refuse to stay buried. A Russian White Guard officer wandering New York, an undocumented immigrant in Brooklyn, a Jewish shopkeeper on the eve of the Nazi and Soviet invasions of 1939, and a village woman trying to save her son from postwar repression all confront loneliness, moral uncertainty, and attempt to preserve their fragile identity in the face of upheaval. Written with subtle irony, emotional restraint, and deep empathy, The House in Baiting Hollow reveals how memory travels across borders and how the wounds of history persist in everyday life. At once intimate and expansive, this collection is a powerful meditation on migration, loss, and the quiet resilience of human values.