The Fifty Year Sword

Mark Z. Danielewski is an American novelist. He is 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 a National Book Award. Danielewski began work on a proposed 27-volume series, The Familiar, although he only completed 5 volumes before the project was discontinued in 2017. Daleewski's work is characterized by a complex multi-layered typographical variety or page layout. Sometimes known as visual writing, the typographical variation corresponds directly, at any given point in time, to the physical space of events in the fictional world as well as the physical space of the page and reader. Early on, critics described his writing as ergodic literature, but more recently, Danielewski, commenting on his disappointment with the inability of criticism to properly confront his work, expressed his theoretical approach to literature: Signiconic = sign + icon. Instead of engaging those textual faculties of the mind in image processing or those visual faculties that process language, syneconics engage both at the same time in order to reduce the importance of both and thus achieve a third perception that is no longer dependent on sign and image to fix a world in which the mind plays no role.” .