The Shanghai Gesture (Out of Print)

This book is now out of print.

"[Gary Indiana] is the primary reporter of the underground, the dissociation of cultures, the new behaviors; there is a sense that if you want to understand what has happened in America, you would have to read Gary Indiana. And this newest book is a leap forward."
—Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm

Synopsis

A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land’s End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship, the Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort, Dr. Obregon Petrie, attempt to thwart Fu Manchu’s latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American Piyas, matching wits with a club-footed ex-Stasi, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies.

The Shanghai Gesture by Gary Indiana =

* In most cases, none of these writers endorse this book. Our math formulas are supposed to be amusing anecdotes, similar to shelf-talkers in bookstores that say "If you like X, you might enjoy Y," or "This Book is like Cormac McCarthy writing an episode of Saved by the Bell with a soundtrack by Philip Glass."

"Half William Burroughs, half William Gibson... funny, in something of the parodic, tongue-in-cheek mode of The Princess Bride or Austin Powers. If you simply enjoy parody, wordplay, scabrous humor and mind-spinning narrative developments—The Shanghai Gesture might be just your kind of jeu d'esprit."
—Washington Post

"An uproarious, confounding, turbocharged fantasia that manages, alongside all its imaginative bravura, to hold up to our globalized epoch the fun-house mirror it deserves. This most socially astute writer has fashioned a riotous artifact that is both self-contained and self-consuming; The Shanghai Gesture is at once a wicked riposte to contemporary failings and an aesthete's hallucinatory folktale. That the writing can balance Indiana's thoroughgoing pessimism with a yarn of such imaginative buoyancy is not the least of its achievements."
—Bookforum

"Captivating and sometimes brilliant... a vaguely apocalyptic sci-fi picaresque that suggests the work of authors as diverse as J.G. Ballard, Laurence Sterne and Joseph Conrad. Indiana's powerful prose... achieves a gnarled lyricism and occasionally dips into delightfully left-field digressions on the Belgian Congo or imaginary telenovelas."
—Time Out New York

"The Wizard of Oz meets Naked Lunch... this strange, filthy, uproarious little novel is a riveting read from start to finish."
—Boldtype

"Ambitious... gonzo social satire."
—Publishers Weekly

Gary Indiana is the author of several previous novels: Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Rent Boy, Resentment, Depraved Indifference, and Do Everything in the Dark, as well as nonfiction works, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, The 120 Days of Salo,Let It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995, Schwarzenegger Syndrome, and Utopia's Debris. 

LIST PRICE: $15.50
PAGES: 232
PRINT ISBN: 978-0-9820151-0-0
RELEASE DATE: 4/1/2009