Recommendations from our site
“This book is the nucleic text in this field. It might be the most meta book that there is. It is an iconic Gen-X novel, written throughout the last half of the 1990s and published in 2000. Johnny Truant, a young man in Los Angeles, is typing pages in the style of diary entries, in the first person. That is the first layer of story that you’re seeing as a reader. Johnny discovers that his neighbor is dead, and when he ventures into his neighbor’s apartment, he finds a trunk filled with pages and pages of a thesis, with faux footnotes, very much like in Pale Fire. The footnotes are basically innumerable, and the very text itself, at a layout level, starts to get peculiar. Words appear to fall off the page as you read them.” Read more...
Arianna Reiche, Novelist
“House of Leaves is really fun to read. It’s an addictive text. Some people don’t get interested, but if you’re game, this is a book that can rule your universe for a good few weeks – and terrify you. Even though it’s highly mediated…it starts to seep into your own personal world. It directly addresses the reader on the first page, stating ‘This is not for you’; so you end up not knowing what’s real and what’s not. Indeed, my husband started reading it when I was out of town and he had to put it in a drawer and hide it because he got so frightened of it. It’s really fun…It’s a print novel that presents a multimedia sensibility in a high literary art form. I think it appeals to people who read for entertainment but also to literary critics and teachers, readers of Derrida and deconstruction – people who have read the works that are alluded to in its pages. It’s a highly intellectual and literary text.” Read more...
The Best Electronic Literature
Jessica Pressman, Literary Scholar
