Michael Shum

Designed by the enormously talented Gigi Little–read more on her blog here.

Thank you to Diana Abu-Jaber for this honor! Click here to see the entire list.

“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

“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 The Time It Takes to Fall and 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

“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 Shou-Yung 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 The Typist and Divining Rod

“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 and Moon Deluxe

“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

It’s happened! My first novel, Queen of Spades, has found its perfect home! Here is the official announcement: Forest Avenue Press has acquired world rights for Queen of Spades, the debut novel by Michael Shou-Yung Shum, tentatively slated for publication in October 2017. Based on the author’s experience working as a poker dealer, Queen of Spades is a modern re-telling of the classic Pushkin fable of the same name, a highly stylized tale set in a Seattle-area casino that combines elements of a Hong Kong gambling movie with literary language and a lively cast of unforgettable characters.

Read the official announcement at Forest Avenue Press

For those of you in the area, please join us on Saturday, April 23, 7:30pm, at Rust Belt Books in Buffalo, NY, for an interactive art event entitled Not the Right Fit, featuring readings by myself, Jaclyn Watterson, Robin Lee Jordan, and Seth Cosimini, and music by Transfer in Jamaica, Dog Model, and Lalalangue.  Prepare to be surprised, delighted, and even astounded!

For more information, please visit Just Buffalo Literary Center and Rust Belt Books

On a very cold day in December, Salvador called a meeting of the Science Club to inform us that he’d discovered a body in an alley several blocks from our junior high, frozen to the pavement behind the dumpsters. This was no ordinary body, he proclaimed, decayed beyond definition. You’re going to want to keep it when you see it. We were skeptical, to say the least. Because he wants to be a forensic pathologist when he grows up, Salvador feels qualified to make these kinds of sweeping statements.

Read the rest in Psychopomp Magazine
Originally appeared in The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review Issue 18

Like events are drawn to one another—Jung recognized the richness of these potentially mysterious connections, and described them as examples of “synchronicity.” Significantly, these connections are not causally related, as are events that take place within our realm of logical understanding (i.e., I turn the knob and a door opens). Rather, synchronous connections are, as Jung suggested, highly idiosyncratic “meaningful coincidences,” with different connections occurring to different people.

Read the rest in Grist Journal: The Writing Life

Kay read the notice announcing the wake in the morning paper, while drinking a very bitter coffee. The deceased was known to her by name only, but it was an old and familiar name, attached to an aristocratic line that Kay respected. A fever hospital in her small hometown, in fact, shared the name. She had been treated there several times as a child, and her sister had died there, not a year old, from a rheumatic disorder.

Read the rest in Burrow Press Review