A metafictional novel addressed to 'you, the Reader,' who keeps buying a book called If on a Winter's Night a Traveler only to find it interrupted after its opening chapter — again and again, across ten different invented novels-within-the-novel.
Books mentioned in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (5)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Silas Flannery's diary: "I stop before I succumb to the temptation to copy out all of Crime and Punishment," quoting its opening lines about Raskolnikov.”
A Thousand and One Nights: “"That story of which I spoke... It must be a story of the Arabian Nights." / "Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?" (referenced multiple times as a real structural model)”
Popol Vuh: “The legendary "Father of Stories" is said to be "the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce."”
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae by Athanasius Kircher: “The kaleidoscope-collecting narrator aims "to reconstruct the museum assembled by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, author of Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646) and inventor of the 'polydyptic theater.'"”
A Treatise on New Philosophical Instruments by David Brewster: “The kaleidoscope was patented in 1817 by the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, author of a Treatise on New Philosophical Instruments, among other works.”
Books that mention If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1)