Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Z. Danielewski (born March 5, 1966) is an American fiction author.

In 1985 Danielewski, aged 19, visited his half-brother, who was living on Rue des Belles Feuilles in Paris.

Here, he began writing on a manual typewriter and enjoying the actual process of writing for the first time.

During this period he wrote a story called "Where Tigers Dance", which he has called "so unfinished it didn't deserve to be called incomplete", but has said that it continued "to roam around" in his imagination.

In 1988 Danielewski graduated from Yale with a degree in English Literature; he had studied under John Hollander, Stuart Moulthrop, and John Guillory.

He was also inspired by Harold Bloom.

In 1989 he moved to Berkeley, California, where he enrolled in an intensive Latin course at the University of California, Berkeley.

He then pursued graduate studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles.

During this time he became involved with Derrida, a documentary about the career and philosophy of Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Danielewski was an assistant editor, sound technician and cameraman, and can be seen adjusting the sound equipment in Derrida's suit jacket at one point in the film.

Danielewski dates the origin of his debut novel House of Leaves to 1990 and a story that he wrote after finding out that his father was dying:

"1990. My father was head of the USC School of Theater. I was living in New York. Then I got the phone call. The 'Mark your father is dying' phone call. He was in the hospital. Renal failure, cancer. I got on a Greyhound bus and headed west. Over the course of three sleepless nights and three sleepless days I wrote a 100+ page piece entitled Redwood. I remember using a fountain pen. I barely had the change to buy sodas and snacks along the way and there I am scratching out words with this absurdly expensive thing of polished resin and gold. I'd like to say it was a Pelikan, but I don't think that's correct. Another thing I seem to remember: the paper I was writing on had a pale blue cast to it. There was also something about how the pen seemed to bite into the paper at the same time as it produced these lush sweeps of ink. A kind of cutting and spilling. Almost as if a page could bleed.

My intention had been to present this piece of writing as a gift to my father.

As has been mentioned many times before, my father responded with the suggestions that I pursue a career at the post office.

I responded by reducing the manuscript to confetti, going so far as to throw myself a pity parade in a nearby dumpster.

My sister responded by returning later to that dumpster, rescuing the confetti, and taping it all back together."

He graduated with an MFA in 1993, the year his father died.

It was also the year he had the idea of a house bigger on the inside than the outside, an image which would become his first novel, House of Leaves.

Danielewski has been a cat lover throughout his life.

Cats show up in myriad ways throughout his works and are a main topic in his series The Familiar.

Writing House of Leaves took ten years, and between 1993 and 1999, Danielewski made a living as a tutor, barista, and plumber.

He eventually found a literary agent in Warren Frazier, who, according to Danielewski, "fell in love with it."

They went to roughly thirty-two publishers before Edward Kastenmeier from Pantheon decided to take on the project.

Small sections of the book were downloadable off the internet before the release of the first edition, and it is said that these sections "circulated through the underbellies of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, through strip clubs and recording studios, long before publication" – though very few were able to experience the book this way initially.

He is most widely known for his debut novel House of Leaves (2000), which won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.

The first edition hardback, which featured special signed inserts, was released on February 29, 2000, and Pantheon released the hardback and paperback editions simultaneously on March 7, 2000.

The novel went on to win the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and gain a considerable cult following.

House of Leaves has been translated into numerous languages, including Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish.

It has been taught in universities.

His second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), was nominated for the National Book Award.

In January 2016, Danielewski adopted two Devon Rex kittens, Archimedes and Meifumado, after his previous Devon Rex companions, Sibyl and Carl died.

Danielewski began work on a 27-volume series, The Familiar, although he completed only five volumes before halting the project in 2017.

Danielewski's work is characterized by an intricate, multi-layered typographical variation, or page layout, which he refers to as "signiconic".

Sometimes known as visual writing, the typographical variation corresponds directly, at any given narratological point in time, to the physical space of the events in the fictional world as well as the physical space of the page and the reader.

Early on, critics characterized his writing as being ergodic literature, and Danielewski has described his style as:"Signiconic = sign + icon. Rather than engage those textual faculties of the mind remediating the pictorial or those visual faculties remediating language, the signiconic simultaneously engages both in order to lessen the significance of both and therefore achieve a third perception no longer dependent on sign and image for remediating a world in which the mind plays no part.'"

Danielewski was born in New York City to Tad Danielewski, a Polish avant-garde film director, and Priscilla Decatur Machold.

Mark was Tad's second child and his first with Priscilla; Mark's sister Anne, also known as Poe, was born two years later.

The Danielewski family moved continuously for Tad's various film projects, and by the age of 10, Mark had lived in six countries: Ghana, India, Spain, Switzerland, Britain and the United States.

He and his sister went to high school in Provo, Utah.

Danielewski has said that these experiences helped him appreciate creativity in all its forms and showed him that "there was much to be learned out there."