Laird Hunt Books in Order

An unnamed operative falls in love in a foreign city and attempts to step away from his secretive organization's work. Its hostile response and his lover's disappearance turn his search for her into an unsettling struggle over memory and identity.

Stories, imagined parables, and invented histories transform Paris into a strange version of itself. Barbers, lovers, dreamers, ghosts, and other inhabitants navigate a city reshaped by humor, melancholy, and the uncertain boundaries between ordinary life and imagination.

On a winter night, Noah Summers revisits his memories of family life on an Indiana farm and his brief marriage to Opal. Letters, enduring love, and unexplained visions shape his attempt to understand decades of separation and loss.

Destitute New Yorker Henry joins a secretive group staging fake assassinations for clients traumatized after September 11. His connection to its enigmatic leader, Mr. Kindt, draws him into psychological games where imagined violence and real danger become difficult to separate.

In a surreal European city filled with living-statue performers, a man fleeing his past encounters a woman burdened by grief. Their developing connection unfolds among informers, ghosts, and strange forces that complicate their search for refuge.

Ginny marries a relative and moves to an isolated Kentucky farm, where his promises conceal cruelty toward the enslaved women living there. Her relationships with Cleome and Zinnia shift under jealousy and violence, exploring complicity, captivity, and survival.

A farmer's wife leaves her husband and disguises herself as Union soldier Ash Thompson during the Civil War. Her experiences of combat and upheaval raise questions about why she departed and what returning home might require.

Inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting, this collaborative novella imagines the lives of stenographer Marge Quinn and her employer, Abraham Chelikowsky. Their working world becomes the setting for an exploration of the stories suggested by an apparently ordinary office scene.

Two women travel through Indiana as crowds gather for a lynching: Ottie Lee seeks the spectacle, while Calla Destry seeks escape and a promised new life. Their journeys reveal a countryside consumed by racial hatred and violence.

A Puritan woman enters the woods of colonial New England and becomes lost, perhaps through escape or abduction. Encounters with strangers and uncanny creatures lead her deeper into a threatening landscape, where memories and fairy-tale horrors intertwine.

After surviving poverty and working in a radium-processing factory, Zorrie returns to rural Indiana seeking belonging. This novel follows her across a lifetime of labor, community, love, and loss shaped by the events of the twentieth century.

These essays connect travel, childhood memories, and literary influences with reflections on writing and experience. Hunt moves from the United Nations to Kansas and European cultural sites, using fiction's methods to explore the interplay between imagination and remembered life.

Fourteen connected stories follow residents of a rural Indiana town through one summer day. Errands, gardening, gossip, and unexpected journeys expose their intertwined lives, private regrets, and the fragile balance between belonging to a community and feeling alone.