Bøger af Mike Corrao

You will perhaps not read a more interactive and fascinating novel than LEOPOLD'S LABYRINTH this year.LEOPOLD'S LABYRINTH puts the reader at the center of a story where they take shape as a recluse residing in the digitally-constructed environments of the future--the cybergothic landscape of the 2020s. It is Sunday evening and they just have begun their pilgrimage into a holy labyrinth, in the hopes that they will come upon new artifacts that radiate a simultaneously corporeal and astral aura. The reader is a miner who mines this place for its meaning. LEOPOLD'S LABYRINTH is a funhouse turned videogame for readers. They must interact with textual artifacts, deduct meaning, and grapple with the complex human issues turned upside down and inside out. You will perhaps not read a more interactive and fascinating novel this year."LEOPOLD'S LABYRINTH is a book that insists upon the second person: 'The labyrinth dominates your vision, ' and, as such, the book pushes outward to surround or swallow the reader. The 'user-body' moves through the labyrinth and toward its center. The 'user-body' goes left or it goes right, and each choice is accompanied by an epigraph. But these choices and epigraphs lead the user 'no closer to this perceived center.' Instead, choices lead to artifacts, which in turn raise questions about the shape, the purpose, the meaning of these forking routes. Why is 'you' here? In fact, why is 'you' at all? Corrao has devised a choose-your-own-adventure-sacral-sci-fi-mythemic staging area. This you pushes and pushes at all the lefts and at all the rights, but ends are elusive. The routes were predetermined, will was an illusion, and the labyrinth needed you so that it might see itself. In other words, Corrao's labyrinth is a machine for thinking-eating-being-finding."--Philp Sorenson, Embodies, Solar Trauma"'The PYRAMID is a feature of my anatomy.' LEOPOLD'S LABYRINTH represents a game of sorts--a game that perhaps every work of art is playing. Here, the pursuit of meaning is condensed into a swirling dungeon crawl. 'The occult is the technology of the self.' Somewhat paradoxically, your build will fail if only comprised of What does this mean? However, What is this doing to me? is an incredibly potent instrument, and will see you to labyrinth's greatest depths, where true transformation may be possible. 'The SERPENT feeds me the data of my former configurations?' Will you uncover the end? Does this path truly belong to you? Can only the dead reach forward?"--B.R. Yeager, Negative Space"A vast, virtual labyrinth full of many artifacts, epigraphs, and boobytraps, LEOPOLD'S LABYRINTH beckons the reader into its fertile depths, where we are free to touch and taste the objects on display. The risk is yours to take. Mike Corrao's latest is an essential entry into his oeuvre, a textual sculpture that rewards many returns. Speedrun or linger, haters and lovers of literature alike will find many delights inside the LABYRINTH." --Logan Berry, Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake, Casket FlareFiction. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid. Art.

In The Persimmon is an Event Mike Corrao explores the yet-to-be-created field of Ovidian Dynamics (a study of the body's metamorphic potentials) as the reader / subject undergoes a series of unwieldy changes.

Two patrons appear in a dim cafe one day. How they've arrived, where they've come from, and why they're there at all, they have no idea. What they do know is that they hate one another. Mike Corrao has with Man, Oh Man masterly crafted a humorous yet insightful experiment that'll have you questioning how you've always approached novels.

-mancer is a yellow phonebook for a familiar but improbable parallel civilization... it is a history as surmised by an artificial intelligence. Mike Corrao's second book with Inside the Castle.

"Fully exploiting the Gogolesque conceit of a cephalophore whose body and head go their own separate ways, Cephalonegativity reads like Beckett's Play (with M reprised as an even more slippery version of himself) or Not I as if performed by the secret society of Acéphale. Archaic turns of phrase and elision combine with post-cinematic headlessness to produce a stage play that plays with stages and stages play, a lesescenario from the velveteen tongue of an heretical zealot, its phrases as if slurped up off an abattoir floor, or off the rotted walls of a theatre-cum-poisoned-amniotic-sac where the performers have all become kuroko. Read out loud, at speed, in honour of its progenitors, the words turn into "chunks of hot pomegranate meat" in your mouth-turned-anus, with your gills agape, your mutinous soma exsanguinated, levitating above you, your head on fire singing like litel clergeon from the catacombs."-¿Gary J. Shipley, author of 30 Fake Beheadings"In pursuing a theatrical treatment of the Self's head and body and self-selves, through a Bataillean notion of headlessness, through typographical humor and rupture, through a Dada-esque document of volatile mirror-pages and chorus, Cephalonegativity makes of itself a gaping gesture: a neck-stub that is a mouth that is singing out and commenting on the ritual of being present. The reader dials in via "a rotary anus" and watches a body hanging as a tail in its coprolalic spooky plastic underwater gloom psychedelia cum outer space inside of a mouth cum cult orgy. "DO/ YOU SEE THE END OF TIME? THE APPROACHING/ WALL? WHEN THE THEATRICAL BECOMES THE/ APOCALYPTIC? ENACTING A DISTORTED REALI-/ TY AS THIN LAYERS OVER THIS ONE?" This text is a porous fabric through which we might perform the wound of the stage as we watch it rot."-¿Olivia Cronk, author of Womonster¿