Carl Shuker

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THE LAZY BOYS is out now from Shoemaker & Hoard.
. . . and the only reasoning I can offer is that to fall is better than to stand still, and the dreams are bad but they are at least my own, but mostly that saying yes is easier than saying no, because in this world when you say yes no one ever asks you your reasons . . .
RICHEY SAUER, EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, white and privileged, drifts into Otago University. Tortured by a drunken incident he can’t remember involving a female student, he descends into a dizzying spiral of substance abuse, sex, bullying, and the violent slipstream of organized sport.
Set in Dunedin, New Zealand, a university town caught up in its own mythology that hides a world of sordid parties, private school cliques and institutionalized violence, The Lazy Boys presents a satirical vision of a generation unmoored from cultural nationalism, bourgeois morality and prospects for the future—young men ripping away not only at the bonds of family and society, but themselves and everything that attracts them.
Shoemaker & Hoard
THE METHOD ACTORS May 05 from Shoemaker & Hoard.
THE METHOD ACTORS TRACES THE DISAPPEARANCE of a young, gifted military historian named Michael Edwards from his desk in Tokyo and his sister Meredith’s return to the city in search of him. Michael’s research into international war crimes trials will take his sister through four hundred years of history, myth and propaganda, love and infidelity, religious transport and hallucination. A cutting-edge debut novel, The Method Actors is set in the flux of Tokyo at the turn of the century. With a cast of wealthy, restless New Yorkers, French kitchenhands, Russian hostesses, Canadian exchange students, Australian ex-drug addicts, High Court judges, reclusive cultivators of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and young Chinese Americans living the high life, The Method Actors leaps effortlessly from character to character, from past to present, from New York to Wellington to Tokyo. The rape of Nanking, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Japan’s quarantining of Dutch merchants on manmade islands in the seventeenth century - all entwine to form a comic, hugely entertaining and often terrifying novel that reveals the dark heart, the centerlessness and moral ambiguity of modern gaijin life in Tokyo. Part historical investigation, part thriller, part love story, The Method Actors is stylistically daring, beautifully lucid and stunning in its emotional and intellectual reach. This is a dense and multilevel narrative that questions the moral framework of our modern world.
Shoemaker & Hoard
PRAISE FOR THE METHOD ACTORS
Winner of the 2006 Prize in Modern Latters, the world's richest prize for an emerging author
“Brash and fearless, The Method Actors is a self-consciously postmodern challenge to our perceived reality and its fictional depiction. Virtually every one of his book’s 500 pages has something worth lingering over.” — New York Times Book Review
“A tremendous stylist and a tremendous observer . . . . again and again I stopped to admire particular sentences and paragraphs.” —Stephen Dobyns, author of The Church of Dead Girls
“I admire Shuker’s bravura attentiveness to the little things as much as I do his shameless and bracing bid for a Pynchonesque grand slam.” —Geoffrey Wolff, author of Duke of Deception
“This dense, ambitious, labyrinthine novel depicts the nuances of an outsider culture in a Japan so current it is slightly futuristic. An engrossing delight, richly imagined, in which cynicism and exuberance alternate in quick succession.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
“An extraordinarily ambitious and often brilliant first novel. I envy Shuker his future.” — David Markson, author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which David Foster Wallace called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country”.. MySpaceScripts.com Profile Editor