In 1988, Danielewski graduated with a degree in English Literature from Yale, where he studied under John Hollander, Stuart Moulthrop, and John Guillory.
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
1989
Berkeley, CA, United States
In 1989 Danielewski studied at University of California, Berkeley, United States.
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
1993
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007, United States
He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1993.
Career
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2002
American writer Mark Z. Danielewski poses during a portrait session held on September 9, 2002, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Anderse)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2002
American writer Mark Z. Danielewski poses during a portrait session held on September 9, 2002, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Anderse)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2002
American writer Mark Z. Danielewski poses during a portrait session held on September 9, 2002, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Anderse)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2006
1714 N Highland Ave, Hollywood, CA 90028, United States
Portrait of author, Mark Z Danielewski at the Powerhouse bar in Hollywood, September 6, 2006. (Photo by Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2007
American author Mark Z. Danielewski poses while in Paris, France to promote his book on the 29th of June 2007. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2007
American author Mark Z. Danielewski poses while in Paris, France to promote his book on the 29th of June 2007. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2007
American author Mark Z. Danielewski poses while in Paris, France to promote his book on the 29th of June 2007. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2013
415 Pacific Coast Hwy, Santa Monica, CA 90402, United States
Mark Danielewski with girlfriend Gina Gonzales at the Young Literati of the Los Angeles Library Foundation party in the Marion Davies Guest Cottage at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica on Aug. 29, 2013.
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2014
9500 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, United States
Mark Danielewski and Gena Gonzales attend Pen Center USA's 24th Annual Literary Awards Festival at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on November 11, 2014 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Allen Berezovsky)
Gallery of Mark Z. Danielewski
2016
Authors Tami Holzman and Mark Z. Danielewski attend the book launch for 'From C-Student to the C-Suite: Leveraging Emotional Intelligence' at PLATFORM in Hayden Tract on August 4, 2016 in Culver City, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer)
In 1988, Danielewski graduated with a degree in English Literature from Yale, where he studied under John Hollander, Stuart Moulthrop, and John Guillory.
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007, United States
He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1993.
415 Pacific Coast Hwy, Santa Monica, CA 90402, United States
Mark Danielewski with girlfriend Gina Gonzales at the Young Literati of the Los Angeles Library Foundation party in the Marion Davies Guest Cottage at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica on Aug. 29, 2013.
9500 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, United States
Mark Danielewski and Gena Gonzales attend Pen Center USA's 24th Annual Literary Awards Festival at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on November 11, 2014 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Allen Berezovsky)
Authors Tami Holzman and Mark Z. Danielewski attend the book launch for 'From C-Student to the C-Suite: Leveraging Emotional Intelligence' at PLATFORM in Hayden Tract on August 4, 2016 in Culver City, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer)
(
In this story set in East Texas, a local seamstress nam...)
In this story set in East Texas, a local seamstress named Chintana finds herself responsible for five orphans who are not only captivated by a storyteller’s tale of vengeance but by the long black box he sets before them. As midnight approaches, the box is opened, a fateful dare is made, and the children as well as Chintana come face to face with the consequences of a malice retold and now foretold.
Mark Z. Danielewski is an American author, novelist. He is best known for his debut novel "House of Leaves."
Background
Mark Z. Danielewski was born on March 5, 1965, in New York City to Priscilla Decatur Machold and Polish avant-garde film director Tad Danielewski. Mark was the first of two children born to Tad and Priscilla. Anne Decatur Danielewski, a.k.a. Poe, an American singer, songwriter, and record producer, was born 2 years after Mark.
Education
Mark with his family moved around continuously for his father's various film projects. By the age of 10, Mark had lived in 6 different countries: Ghana, India, Spain, Switzerland, England, and the United States. He and his sister attended Provo High School in Utah, United States.
In 1988, Danielewski graduated with a degree in English Literature from Yale, where he studied under John Hollander, Stuart Moulthrop, and John Guillory. In 1989 Danielewski 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 University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1993.
Mark Z. Danielewski served as an assistant editor and worked on sound for Derrida, a documentary based on the life of the Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Mark Z. Danielewski is the author of an avant-garde first novel, "House of Leaves," and son of the late filmmaker, Tad Danielewski. Danielewski told Michael Sims of BookPage that his father “had been steeped in the 1950s, the literature of the modernists. So certainly the discussions of Freud and Nietzsche and Borges and Sartre were all part of what we discussed and fought about.” Danielewski wrote his first book at age ten, nearly four hundred pages about a boy who grows up to become a cocaine addict in New York City and ends up in prison. His parents found it disturbing. He later showed it to a high school teacher who rejected it as being “dirty” because of his use of four-letter words. Because of these and similar experiences, Danielewski became reluctant to show his work to anyone else.
House of Leaves appeared in installments on the Internet before it was published in print form. Sims wrote that “it’s difficult to imagine a more original and distinctive novel.” Danielewski uses multiple typefaces for his narrators and hundreds of footnotes. He sometimes runs his text at an angle or sideways, and includes music, poetry, collages, lists, and a passage from Homer in five languages. “While these narrative games are all good fun, House of Leaves adds up to more than playfulness,” wrote Sims. “As it should be in such a nightmarish fantasy, what appears to be a barrier is actually a gateway. Like Joyce and Proust, Danielewski isn’t rejecting narration as much as customizing and turbo-charging it.”
Library Journal reviewer Jim Dwyer called "House of Leaves" “simultaneously a highly literary work and an absolute hoot.” Newsweek contributor Malcolm Jones felt the book “is surprisingly fun to read, a sort of postmodern funhouse where the reader becomes the author’s partner in putting the story together. Like Dave Eggcrs’s hit memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, House of Leaves comments on itself as it goes along. It is also flat-out terrifying. Think of it as The Blair Witch Project with footnotes.”
Photojournalist Will Navidson, his wife, Karen Green, and their two children move into a Virginia farmhouse on Ash Tree Lane. The interior dimensions of the house are larger than the outside dimensions. Passageways and closets appear, walls move, and Will brings in a crew headed by explorer Holloway Roberts to enter the abyss. During a series of expeditions, they find a network of stairways and halls which shift and change.“The story of these expeditions interacts with an account of Navidson’s relationship with Karen, from whom he ventures and tries to return,” explained Robert Kelly in the New York Times Book Review. “Karen, painfully transiting from cover girl to soccer mom (or, for a harsher critic, one female cliché to another), exudes bafflement, tenderness, rage. Her character is finally as amorphous as the dark spaces within the house. For it is her house too, and one reading of this book might suggest that these perilous, seductive abysses can be probed like the feminine psyche itself, that they represent the Other Woman whom the jealous Karen sees her husband constantly attending.” Kelly described House of Leaves as “a story about a story about a story about a film about a house with a black hole in it.”
“Danielewski ends up dealing with the age-old theme of ‘the enemy within’ in an extremely current way,” averred Nathan Matteson at Weekly Wire online. “At the risk of befouling Conrad, perhaps a better title would’ve been ‘House of Blair’s Heart of Darkness.’ ” A Publishers Weekly reviewer who called the novel “a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status,” also declared that “the story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts. This potentially cumbersome device actually enhances the horror of the tale, rather than distracting from it.”
Will decides to film the whole experience, and his notes, titled “The Navidson Report,” end up in the hands of an old blind man named Zampano. When Zampano dies, the papers are found by the narrator, Johnny Truant, who works in a tattoo parlor. Truant continues to work on the manuscript, and through his footnotes, the reader learns of his discovery of the papers and his own experiences with sex and drugs. “This work is a kaleidoscopically layered and deconstructed H. P. Lovecraft-style horror story,” appraised Eric Robbins in Booklist. Danielewski’s sister, the singer known as Poe, released an album titled "Hauntings" as a complement to her brother’s novel.
Later in 2000, Danielewski and his publisher issued "The Whalestone Letters," a short, but self-contained expanded section from House of Leaves.
His second novel, "Only Revolutions," was released in 2006.
On September 15, 2010, Danielewski announced his next novel on his message board: "Later this month publishers will receive the first 5 volumes of Danielewski"s 27 volume project entitled "The Familiar." The story concerns a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten." The first volume "One Rainy Day in May" was released in the United States on May 12, 2015 and the second volume "Into the Forest" on October 27, 2015.
Danielewski's work is characterized by experimental choices in form, such as intricate and multi-layered narratives, typographical variation, and inconsistent page layouts, otherwise known as visual writing, or as he refers to it, "signiconic" literature.
Nonetheless, Danielewski has said that this time in Utah, as well as his experiences elsewhere, helped him to gain an appreciation for creativity in all its forms, and the traveling showed him that "there was much to be learned out there." He was also inspired by Harold Bloom.
Quotations:
"People over the years have constantly asked me if I’m a postmodern writer, or a deconstructionist writer, or whatever phrase was at hand. I finally decided I would invent a terminology myself: I describe my work as “signiconic,” which is a word that combines “sign” and “icon.” What signiconic writing does is embrace the possibility of engaging the mind not only on a visual level but on a linguistic level as well, and at the same time, without ever letting either side claim dominance. We can be completely immersed in text. And we can be completely intoxicated by the visual - whether it’s a television screen or an Instagram feed. But by engaging both at the same time, you destabilize both sides, and open the mind up to many other perceptions - even a third perception, if you will. My exploration is with how text and image can approach this place where both of them kind of fall away, allowing the reader to begin to sense a world beyond our purely retinal limitations or our syntactical, synaptic limitations."
"When I'm writing I'm in a totally different world. It's solitary. The muses are talking or not talking. There's lightening."
Personality
Mark Z. Danielewski is a fan of "Biffy Clyro" as the band discovered when Danielewski attended one of their shows after they borrowed the title of his novel Only Revolutions for their own album.
Interests
cats, favourite actor - Shia LaBeouf
Writers
Richard McGuire, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Carlos Fuentes, Jack Kerouac, "Giraffe" by J.M. Ledgard, "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky