Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Z. Danielewski is an American fiction author. 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. His second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), was nominated for the National Book Award. In addition, Danielewski began work on a prolapsed 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 "sign iconic." 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 and the physical space of the page and the reader.

Danielewski dates the origin of his debut novel House of Leaves to 1990 and a story he wrote after finding out that his father was dying. 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,[11] 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 first edition's release. 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.

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 won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and gained 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. In addition, it has been taught in universities.

On June 18, 2018, Danielewski released a TV pilot script for the novel in the House of Leaves book club on Facebook.