Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblad, and this week I'm happy to have as my guest, Mark Z.

Danielowski, his book, House of Leaves, has been published by Pantheon, and I decided as soon as I got it that I wanted to include it in this series, which is called a heartbreaking group of staggering geniuses, because it is my sense that there's an air and fiction of foot in America

that's bringing back surprising, challenging, funny, difficult,

non, in fact, anti-minimalist fictions.

And this book, House of Leaves, is certainly a primary one of them. In fact, I first received it in the mail

in a kind of manuscript form, and, you know, when I flipped its pages and saw some of them

blank, some of the single sentence, some with spatial designs on it, footnotes all over the place,

pictures and illustrations, and mazes and bibliographies and

glossaries.

I knew it was going to be the kind of book that I get lost in, and I grew immediately afraid

of it with justification, I'm afraid.

So I want to ask in the most basic and factual way, how did this book begin?

What was the origins?

It was a long, long time ago, in a city far, far away.

I had left college, and I was in, I was actually working at an inn in Vermont.

And I knew that I was going to write a big book, but I couldn't perceive it.

...