In the internationally acclaimed author’s first novel since Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana applies his prickly wit, nihilistic vision, and utterly original voice to this side-splitting spin on Fu Manchu.

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 is not a genre farce, but a compelling tale that merges the author’s trademark eye for social satire with the beautifully poetic sensibilities of his previous novels.

* Spring Book Pick. -Village Voice

"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."
- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"[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, Bookworm

"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."
- James Gibbons, 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."
-Scott Indrisek, 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." -David Zax, Boldtype

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

*Listen to Gary Indiana's interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm.

*Listen to Gary Indiana reading from The Shanghai Gesture as a serialized audiobook now available from Bomb Magazine and Art International Radio.

"Indiana has gloriously revived an obscure Hollywood film of the same name, infused it with eroticism and intrigue - and added Dr. Fu Manchu! The result is a lustrous, laugh-out-loud world of bawd and mayhem; an erudite, charmingly operatic opium den of decadence that seesaws between high brow and low camp and reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers." —Arthur Nersesian

"The book is brilliant and hilarious and strange. It reads fast and understands, as only graphic novels seem to get things now, that the deficit attention span is insulted by anything that doesn’t surprise." —Michael Tolkin