"Innovative, comic, bizarre and beautiful, The Impossibly reads as if Donald Barthelme were channeling Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Ben Marcus and reruns of Get Smart."--Time Out New York
When the anonymous narrator botches an assignment from the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life becomes a participant in his punishment. In the end, he is called out of retirement for a final assignment: to seek and identify his own assassin. This edition includes an introduction by Percival Everett, an afterword by the author, and a "lost chapter."
Called "one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today" by Paul Auster, Laird Hunt is the author of four genre-bending novels and was a finalist for the 2010 PEN Center USA Award. Born in Singapore and educated at Indiana University and the Sorbonne in Paris, Hunt has lived in Tokyo, London, The Hague, New York, and on an Indiana farm. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Industry Reviews
"A fractured espionage story, John le Carre 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 book's 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, Hunt's subtle humor, sophisticated intelligence and the graceful timbre of his prose place this novel firmly in the tradition of The Castle, as well as Nabokov's The Eye and Thomas Bernhard's 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 Auster's City of Glass in the first few chapters, and he brings a decidedly Kafkaesque feel to the spy's 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 Hunt's 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, Hunt's 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
"The Impossibly, by Laird Hunt, is a spy story. Sort of...This novel's noir tone comes from the uncertainty of the world, not just the dark of night time."-The Urbana Free Library Blog
