In print, it weighs in at 709 pages (“It’s a big statement for the trees”), and from there he didn’t stop: Only Revolutions (2007) is a Möbius strip of a book spanning from 1845 to 2045, told as a road trip story through the eyes of 16-year-olds Hailey and Sam, lovers who crisscross in their journey. His breakthrough novel House of Leaves began as an online experiment of drawings and text, adopted by a limited audience before finding a publisher in 2001.

But saying that’s the concept is like saying James Joyce’s Ulysses is about a single day in Dublin.ĭanielewski uses every literary tool available - varying font sizes, colors, footnotes, epistolary, movie scripts, aged documents, math equations, plus a few graphics here and there - to fill his books.

6 now), which concerns a little girl and a kitten that’s actually a window into the span of universal time. Cats turn up a lot in his books, especially the new series, The Familiar (up to Vol. LA-based since 1990, Danielewski finds normalcy in a rural homestead with his wife and pair of cats (Archimedes and Meifumado, the latter named after a manga comic). Of his most recent novel series, The Familiar, one reader commented that it’s “pretty much a graphic novel where the percentage of text to image is reversed.” Danielewski liked that comment. They borrow from movies - David Lynch comes to mind, but also the time compression play of Christopher Nolan - as much as from graphic novels. In town for the literary fest sponsored by National Book Store and Raffles Makati, the New York-born Danielewski comes from a filmmaking father and visually oriented mother, so it’s understandable that his books go beyond the usual confines of storytelling. You experience Danielewski’s books as objects even before you scan a single paragraph: they’re laid out in challenging blocks of text, sometimes crisscrossing into blurs of ink, sometimes reversed or boxed within other chunks of text, sometimes spread out so that pages contain… one… word… at… a… time. Reading the STAR recently (while staying at Raffles Makati for this weekend’s Philippine Readers and Writers Festival), he came across the term “shabu.” “I only know shabu-shabu, so I thought, ‘They’re confiscating soup now? Things are getting out of control!’”Īuthor meets Manila. Danielewski is a voracious consumer of text, but finds himself baffled by Philippine newspapers.

Danielewski books