Or stories within stories, if you will, the most famous example being The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet. Cloud Atlas contained interlocking narratives, Don Quixote had a number of digressive texts such as The Tale of Foolish Curiosity, while various modern novelists describe the efforts of writer protagonists to bring novels to life, from Murakami to Sue Townsend, but which particular example could be considered most memorable?

Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is memorable for the fact that it has so many (incomplete) stories within the main story.

Lovecraft, obviously: Necronimicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, et. al.

R.W. Chambers (and K.E. Wagner), The King in Yellow

You'd have to reckon Scheherazade is the Daddy (or, more correctly Mummy) of the genre.

Swann's Way in In Search Of Lost Time

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy within The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Not a story but definitely a book within a book. And a very important character in the story in it's own right.

You are going to be hard pushed to find something with more digressive stories referenced or told within the main story than Lord of the Rings, mind. Tolkein created a world and wrote it's mythology, and then set an adventure story against that fully realised world and mythology. Some of it described in the main text, lots of it detailed in numerous appendixes. Some of it even published later as a book of it's own.

Amor de Cosmos wrote:


Or The Canterbury Tales? Which predates the other?

The Bible, Torah and Qur'an are not dissimilar in terms of structure, either...

Forgot one: "Goldstein's book", 1984

Janik wrote:


The composite of Scheherazade is reckoned to be 8th century, though some of the tales are very much older. Quite a while before Chaucer anyway — but he can be the Daddy if she's the Mummy.

The Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers Karamazov. Sort of.

An unarguable entrant from the Comic/Graphic Novel fraternity; Tales of the Black Freighter within Watchmen. A comic within a comic.

I thoroughly enjoy the idea behind The Black Freighter and the entire Pirate comic genre. In the Watchmen universe, masked vigilantes exist, so there would be little interest in comics about people like them, as something real can't be escapist. Ergo the comic writers in the Watchmen universe would pick on something else, like pirates, to take people out of their real world and into imaginery ones.
Such thought is typical of the impressive depth of Watchmen. The pirate story is not really intrinsic to the plot* (c.f. the film doing away with it), although the development of the comic-within-a-comic story does work as a commentary on the main story, but it's there and is wholly logical within the confines of the developed universe.

SPOILER

*Well, one of the leading comic script writers within the universe (christ the terminology here gets confusing, doesn't it?) provides the scenario for Ozymandias' plot to bring about world peace. He, along with the others specialists who realise the plot, then get murdered by Ozymandias to prevent them revealing the world peace inspiring incident is in fact a fabrication.
But hey, that bit of plot development could all have been achieved without the space devoted to the Black Frieghter and the Pirate comics back-story. None of the other essential specialists for Ozmandias' plot were given such treatment. It's almost as if we are meant to think that comic script writers have some kind of supieror power to shape the world, isn't it? Max Shea as a proxy Alan Moore.

The works of de Selby in The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive. More than one book, but the same idea.

In Philip K. Dick's alternate history novel The Man In The High Castle the Axis powers won WW2, and the western US is ruled by Japan. However, there is an illegal book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy doing the rounds, which suggests that this is all an illusion, and in fact the Allies won the war (though not in the same way as in real life).

The author of i]The Grasshopper Lies Heavy[/i] wrote it using the I Ching; I think that Dick also made heavy use of the I Ching in writing this novel.

It's one of his best.

BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates fits the book within a book category due to the fact that apart from a first and last chapter, the rest of the chapters are pamphlets which the reader can read in any order they wish. In this way the reader creates multiple books form the one narrative

The ‘book in a box’ is ostensibly about a reporter going back to his home town in the East Midlands to cover the football fixture between ‘City and United’ but the match is merely the plot device in creating a moving, Proustian meditation on memory, love and loss as the protagonist visits his old haunts.

It was denounced as avant garde, pretentious and gimmicky on its release in 1969 but has since been seen reappraised as one of the lost gems of 1960’s literature.

Nabokov's Pale Fire sort of qualifies here. A poem and a critique of the verse/poet makes up the novel. Metafiction indeed.

Old Vlad was pretty keen in inserting made up book titles and authors in his work, but that's another topic.

House of Leaves does this to excess, being a book about a book about a film about a house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

An impressive piece of work on the author's part, if not exactly the best book ever written.

Wings of the Fire by A.P.J Abdul Kalam.One of the outrageous
book in the world.




swim caps

Books within books were mainstays of 19th century fiction in particular, no? (He pronounces confidently, because he can't think of particular examples.) Although memoirs, diaries, 18thC-style epistolary accounts etc were probably used more often.

Robert W Chambers' The King In Yellow is (though not actually that great a read) a pretty pure example of the conceit: a corrupting book that wreaks havok in the lives of those who read it, some of which we get to read. Presumably the makers of The Ring were aware of it.

I'm going to blow the whistle on The Unfortunates, though: no book within a book there, just a book you can shuffle. A very good one too. What I like about B.S. Johnson is that he's really local and totally of his time. Even though he was reaching for far-out, experimental techniques, he was - naturally for someone who didn't grow up in the international jet set - somewhat vanilla when compared to his French contemporaries or even his posh English forerunners. But what he wrote was so much closer to home and so well done that I love his stuff.

At Swim Two Birds has a book within a book within a book

Trump that

Maybe read it first though