Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Michael Shou-Yung Shum eventually found himself dealing poker in a dead-end casino in Lake Stevens, Washington. Two doctorates bookend this strange turn of events: the first in Psychology from Northwestern, and the second in English from University of Tennessee. Along the way, Michael spent a dozen years in Chicago, touring the country as a rave DJ. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, with his spouse and three cats. Queen of Spades is his first novel.
Starred review, Library Journal: "Shum’s first novel benefits
greatly from its deadpan, occasionally absurdist style. Set mainly
within a remote casino outside Seattle, the story follows itinerate
dealer Arturo Chan from his first night of employment by pit boss
Mannheim and manager Gabriela—both fiercely intelligent, with
strict expectations. It’s rare to encounter high seriousness and
humor under one cover, but the author’s layered grasp of gambling
and its contingencies, its potential to dominate players
emotionally, charges the narrative with thrills and danger."
“Michael Shou-Yung Shum’s Queen of Spades is a remarkable debut by
an enormously talented young writer who has produced a literary
delight that circles the dead center of a very dangerous
pleasure—casino gambling. The novel is a perfectly rendered view of
gambling from the inside, the dealers and their overseers in the
casinos, hard at work but with vastly different objectives. Some
are company men and women, others—and some here in Queen of
Spades—not so much. The novel is a lovely and complex gambling
fairy tale that twists and turns in intriguing ways on its way to a
most satisfying conclusion.”
—Frederick Barthelme, author of Bob the Gambler
“A magical debut—literally. This tale is both spare and sprawling,
gritty and otherworldly, both an homage to the complex psychology
of gambling and a cautionary tale for those watching from the rail.
A ridiculously satisfying read.” —Jamie Ford, New York Times
bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, and
Songs of Willow Frost “In a spellbinding structure that spirals
around the mysterious Royal Casino, Queen of Spades weaves a cast
of high-stakes dealers and gamblers closer and closer together as
if within a spider’s web. Though their games are staked on chance,
these characters’ lives intersect by fate, destiny and magic.
Michael Shou-Yung Shum has written a luminous and mesmerizing
debut, a novel I couldn’t put down.”
—Anne Valente, author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
“Likable characters, a strong plot, and that most elusive of all
qualities: a satisfying ending.”
—Michael Keefe, bookseller, Annie Bloom’s Books
“Queen of Spades is a paean to the deeply human thrill of
gambling—part fond portrait of casino life, part poker-faced
mysticism, part exploration of the risks we’re willing to take in
search of meaning. Michael Shum has imagined a world in which
cosmic forces are at play, populated it with odd and charming
seekers and turned them loose among the games of chance to seek
their destinies. Like drawing just the right card to a longshot
inside straight, what they find—and what we read—seems at once
astonishing and dazzlingly preordained. A remarkable and original
debut, rendered in impossibly lucid prose.”
—Michael Knight, author of Eveningland
“Queen of Spades shimmers with suspense and a magical sense of
forces just beyond our ken. Debut novelist Michael Shou-Yung Shum
deftly deals hand after narrative hand, initiating the reader into
the mysteries of the gambler’s universe, its language, laws and
gorgeous arcana. I felt I wasn’t so much reading as leaning over a
high-stakes gambling table as this quartet of vulnerable characters
played for their lives. How will the cards fall? How will their
lives transform? And who is the elegant and mysterious Countess who
watches it all from her high-backed chair? An addictive and wholly
satisfying reading experience.”
—Marjorie Sandor, editor of The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the
Shadows
“In Queen of Spades, many unlikely and uncanny events transpire,
all against a brooding and moody Pacific Northwest somehow
reminiscent of both Twin Peaks and Crime and Punishment. How has an
American writer created a brand-new nineteenth-century Russian
classic in 2016? His name is Michael Shou-Yung Shum, and he
has.”
—Margaret Lazarus Dean, author of Leaving Orbit
“Queen of Spades raises gambling to a metaphysics that reminds us
being in the world is an amalgam of gratuitous rules, chance,
danger, and faintly Borgesian sleights-of-hand. Many may read
Shum’s smart, fast, impressive debut as a how-to fiction about
betting, but at the end of the day it’s really all about the
epistemologically and ontologically incomprehensible all the way
down.”
—Lance Olsen, author of Dreamlives of Debris
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