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An atmospherically intense love story and a thrilling, fantastical tale of lost souls in peril.
Set in a dream-like European city reminiscent of Barcelona, along a boulevard teeming with artists who perform as living statues, comes the beautiful and frightening story of a man running from his past, a woman consumed by grief, and the forces that pursue them both.
New to the city, Harry is drawn to the boulevard, and particularly to Solange, a silent, silver angel awash in Lucite tears and heartbreak. Haunted by his own mysterious tragedy, but determined to woo her, Harry visits Almundo’s Store for Living Statues and begins his transformation into the golden “Knight of the Woeful Countenance.”
A love story related in the dark, stylish noir of continental cinema and overlaid with a patina of Surrealism, this is a novel where friends are also informers, street theater is the lifeblood of culture, and refuge can be found in the belly of a yellow, papier mâché submarine.
As the lovers reckon with seers offering answers to insoluble questions, neighbors who take evening strolls with the dearly departed, critics who control more than artistic fate, and shoes determined to lead their wearers astray, they come to understand the price of survival and what it means to travel along the ray of the star.
Called “one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today” by Paul Auster, Laird Hunt is the author of three previous, genre-bending novels: The Impossibly, The Exquisite, and Indiana, Indiana. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.

In the wake of 9/11, Henry, a New Yorker left destitute by circumstance and obsession, is plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy outfit whose primary business is arranging for staged murders of anxiety-ridden clients unhinged by the “events downtown” and seeking to experience—and live through—their own carefully executed assassinations. When Henry joins this nefarious crew, which includes a beautiful blonde tattooist named Tulip, contortionist twins, and a woman referred to only as “the knockout,” he becomes inextricably linked to its ringleader, the mysterious herring connoisseur Mr. Kindt, whose identity can be traced through twists and turns all the way back to the corpse depicted in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson.

Mirrored by a concurrently running story set in a hospital where Henry and Mr. Kindt are patients attended to by a certain Dr. Tulp, the mysteries surrounding Mr. Kindt’s past, Henry’s fate, and murders both staged and real, begin to unravel in the most extraordinary ways. Substantive, stylish, and darkly comic, The Exquisite is a skillful dissection of reality, human connection, and the very nature of existence.

A beautiful and surreal tale of love and loss in America’s heartland, Indiana, Indiana is the story of one simple man’s life told through the echoes of his memories and the correspondence between him and his wife. Written in a masterful elegiac style reminiscent of Faulkner and Steinbeck, this poignant novel is a moonlit American saga firmly grounded in an Indiana landscape populated by drifters, ministers, sheriffs, and kin-a terrain dominated by big sky and charged with the haunting music of rust-ruined tools and heartbreaking twists of fate.

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 the novella, “Green Metal Door,” the first edition’s “lost chapter.”