Smut-Maker

by Mike Corrao

A 72 act play participating in the Theater of Impotence. Presented to you by publisher, Inside the Castle, in full and vibrant color.

Genres: Literature

167 pages, ebook

First published March 31, 2020

About the author

Mike Corrao is the author of numerous works including Gut Text (11:11 Press), Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press), Desert Tiles (Equus Press), and Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle). His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object.

Reviews

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say with certainty that I read every single word of Mike Corrao's Smut-Maker, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is not a work that you absorb so much as one that you defeat. With text that squirms across the page in constantly shifting sizes, configurations, and directions, against power-clashing, technicolored background combinations that often seem chosen intentionally to make the eyes bleed, this psychotic, psychedelic drama demands you fight for every page turn. Though it bills itself as a play in 72 acts, and all of the dialogue is dutifully bracketed by quotation marks, it's hard to imagine how it would be performed save by a group of maybe a half-dozen or so actors on a bare stage talking over each other all at once (just to be clear, I would absolutely go see this play). The best I can do for potential touchstones would be to liken it to the nauseating, spiraling, stream-of-altered-consciousness passages in Hubert Selby, tossed into a centrifuge with some of Mark Z. Danielewski's wilder formalist notions - but even that description feels forced.

There are characters - I'm pretty sure - or at least references to names that could be characters. The titular Smut-Maker, for one, as well as a number of "Boys" who seem to be involved in various violent and/or sexual relations with one another. Wittgenstein, Bolano, Sun Ra, detectives, and the author himself come in and out of focus as well. It's pretty much impossible to parse, but parsing it's not really the point. If you swim around in it long enough, little snippets of comedy and pathos, absurdity and wisdom, will start to bob to the surface around you, and by the time you're done, you may well want to flip right back to the beginning and start again. For this is also a work you could read 100 times and still never read the same way twice - like a Choose Your Own Adventure through Hell, where no matter what page you keep your finger on, you're never getting out alive.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s like long distance running. The first half hour is painful & you don’t know how anyone could enjoy it, but once you get into a rhythm you feel like you can go on forever. If you’re looking for long distance reading, check out Smut-Maker by Mike Corrao via Inside the Castel.

[Mike Corrao · Rating 5 out of 5]

My feelings about this title are known.

[Downward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt feverish and concussed when I read this: an explosion of language functioning illustratively, the fractured experience of sex and love and language and academia and car accidents and loitering laid out over abstract art that is sometimes shaped like a map or a blueprint or bucolic backgrounded with striking colors. there's a metatextual awareness and acknowledgment here in the vein of, like, markson filtered through the candy colors of pop art. It's great to see a book like this that is entirely itself, and that you're baffled by but still gives you a reaction in your nervous system or your circulatory system or your digestive system.

[Jack Freed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phantasmagoric describes Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker. That’s only one of his words that sent me to “Google.” “Smut” was another. I read Smut-Maker from beginning to end and then from end to beginning. Funny! Thought-provoking! “Everything is simple!”, or is it? For me, as a preacher, I wondered: Do “Morphemes drip from my mouth?” Corrao writes, “No one is ever sure of what they’re looking at,” so I’m scanning his pages one more time. Fascinating stuff, even for a 92-yr-old philosopher/theologian like me.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 3 out of 5]

"blackblood pools on the ground"
"my skull is emptied of it's contents"
"in search of lost meanings"
"where each step reforms the original swell"
"column of instrumentalists"
"slouching towards a new dreamscape."
(applause)

Hard to read, but fun to picture as a play with Mike Corrao standing on a dimly lit stage with thirty voices shouting at him at once about Bolaño and masturbation. Not recommended for the color blind.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no idea what the words mean — "a pub that looks like a bar", "a pub that looks like a bank", " a bank that looks like a warehouse" — but this ebook is very colorful and nicely laid out visually.

[Holden Rasmussen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my full review here: https://www.wellerbookworks.com/no-mo...

[Phillip Freedenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smut-Maker by Mike Corrao and John Trefry is such a singular and towering work of creativity, imagination, and innovation that in some regards I would describe it as an unrelenting progressive act of literary rebellion, which provokes on each page, a poetic revolution which upends the dominate conventions of structure and narrative to invite readers into a not too distant future where the role of the novel in our culture is far from dead, when in fact within books like Smut-Maker we are reminded that as a collective community of authors, artists, publishers, critics, readers, and thinkers, we as a collective are capable of reimagining the potential of our future world rather than simply position ourselves to submit to the omnipotence of the oppressive systems of our traditional dominate power structures.

Write/ Read/ Create/ Rebel/ Revolt

Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic

Buffalo, NY
August 2025

[John Trefry · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hurting me!!! Send help, please!!!