When a hit man takes a sabbatical to focus on love, his bosses aren’t happy

in an award-winning debut novel that earns comparison to Paul Auster and Kafka. 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.

A supple, near-surreal noir thriller that is “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).

This new edition includes an introduction by Percival Everett, an afterword by the author, and the novella, “Green Metal Door,” the first edition’s “lost chapter.”