The Impossibly

Finalist for 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award

“Hunt is an intellect and a great spinner of claustrophobic noir plots, and his erudite gumshoe yarn owes as much to Georges Perec and Gertrude Stein as it does to Paul Auster.” —The Believer

“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 Star Tribune

“[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

“One of the most exciting debut novels I have ever read. . . . A marvelous, wonderful novel.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

“A challenging and inventive work, alternately chilling and humorous, that breaks new ground in the world of speculative fiction.” —Rain Taxi

“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

“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

“A fractured espionage story, John le Carré à la Borges.” —The Stranger

Born in Singapore and educated at Indiana University and The Sorbonne in Paris, Hunt has also lived in Tokyo, London, The Hague, New York City, 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.