Synopses & Reviews
"The first time we met, it was about a stapler, I think."
Deadpan delivery and a sly eye for detail characterize the anonymous secret agent in Laird Hunt's tense, funny spy noir. When the nameless narrator botches an assignment for the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life—including his new girlfriend—is revealed to be either true-blue, double operative, or both.
With the literary coyness of Paul Auster and the dark absurdity of Kafka, Hunt's debut is a daring, memory-driven narrative that is as fittingly spare as a bare ceiling light—and just as pendulous. On the surface, the narrator is a simple man, fixing his washer and dryer, strolling through city parks, falling in love at an office supply store. But in The Impossibly, the mundane gives way to outrageous misconduct, and with each unexpected visitor or cryptic note, the tension reaches tantalizing heights. As the narrator frugally doles out clues about his dangerous work in an unnamed European city, the reader inevitably becomes confidante and fellow gumshoe. The narrator's final assignment—to identify his own assassin—dismantles the reader's own analysis of the evidence.
Marketing Plans:
•National author tour includes: East Coast, West Coast, Minneapolis/St. Paul
• Co-op available
Laird Hunt is an editor for the Department of Public Information at the United Nations, and is New York correspondent for London's Mouth-to-Mouth Magazine. He has lived in Singapore, London, Paris, The Hague, Tokyo, and throughout the United States. The Impossibly has been showcased on the Fence literary magazine website. He lives in New York City.
Review
Hunt is an intellect and a great spinner of claustrophobic noir plots, and his erudite gumshoe yarn owes as much to George Perec and Gertrude Stein as it does to Paul Auster.”
The BelieverEvery once in a long while, you discover a novel unlike anything else youve ever read. Laird Hunts debut is one of them. Innovative, comic, bizarre and beautiful.” Time Out New York
A fractured espionage story, John le Carré à la Borges.” The Stranger
For 200 pages, Hunt sustains an atmosphere of severe disorientation, packing his story with more curious and vaguely menacing strangers than a David Lynch movie. . . . The books many layers and difficult questions make it an ideal candidate for an adventurous book club.” Minneapolis Star Tribune
The Impossibly is one of the most exciting debut novels I have ever read. . . . While most Kafka comparisons are specious and overstated, Hunts subtle humor, sophisticated intelligence and the graceful timbre of his prose place this novel firmly in the tradition of The Castle, as well as Nabokovs The Eye and Thomas Bernhards The Loser. This is high praise indeed, but The Impossibly is a marvelous, wonderful novel.” Review of Contemporary Fiction
"[Laird Hunt] captures the tone of Paul Austers City of Glass in the first few chapters, and he brings a decidedly Kafkaesque feel to the spys early adventures.” Publishers Weekly
Hunt debuts with a stylish, if opaque, noir tale about a hit man who falls in love, takes a break, and incurs the wrath of his organization. . . . The mystery runs at all levels here, and the style and situation have appeal.” Kirkus Reviews
The Impossibly, Laird Hunts first novel, is a challenging and inventive work, alternately chilling and humorous, that breaks new ground in the world of speculative fiction. Diffuse with noir tropes stripped of their origins, it leaves the reader with a map of the complicit mind trying to deal with perversity and adversity in a violent world.” Rain Taxi Review of Books
From the title to the last, dreamlike passage, Hunts novel is a deliberate, sometimes striking conundrum, one with its origins deep in the heart of traditional genres (in particular, hardboiled detective fiction and international spy thrillers), but with ambitions that extend into knotty problems of narrative, language, and meaning.” American Book Review
Synopsis
Fiction. Simultaneously a compellingly elusive roman noir and an eccentric meditation on the nature of perception, THE IMPOSSIBLY reads like it was written by the bastard child of Dashiell Hammett and a distracted but brilliant professor of abstract mathematics. THE IMPOSSIBLE is a stylish and heady novel, which takes the philosophical detective story onto entirely new, and delightfully unstable, ground. It is one of the few good things to happen to the genre's development to happen in America since Paul Auster's New York Trilogy" - Brian Evenson. "The care and delight he takes in every word, from pronoun to article, definite or indefinite, offers the reader a rare and precise pleasure" - Ammiel Alcalay.
Synopsis
Surrealism meets noir in this brilliant, witty, chilling novel of international espionage.
About the Author
Laird Hunt is an editor for the Department of Public Information at the United Nations. He has lived in Singapore, London, Paris, the Hague, Tokyo, Bloomington Indiana, Greenwich Connecticut, and Boulder, Colorado. Hunt has work forthcoming in the Knopf anthology Lost Classics, edited by Michael Ondaatje.
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Laird Hunt