Metaliterature authors

[Gouragopal]

Does anyone know about this posmodern avant garde authors? Thanks! Ps its supposed to be like the glass bead game style of putting all sorts of things together...i know ulysses by joyce, andre gide and...???
Vino

[Lokasenna]

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire leaps to mind, though the area is hardly my forte...

(edit) - my flatmate has just suggested Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. But then, he is a Pynchon specialist, so I guess he would...

[ChicagoReader]

Cervantes' Don Quixote and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five come to mind.

[Panglossian]

Mark Z. Danielewski (The House of Leaves)
Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)
Harry Mathews (Tlooth. The Conversions)
Russell Hoban (The Medusa Frequency. Riddley Walker)
Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper)
Nabokov (Pale Fire. The Gift. Ada)
William Gass (The Tunnel)
Blaise Cendrars (Moravagine)

[Jive One]

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne if you don't mind a little 18th century literature.

[conartist]

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino features the first chapters of ten different novels contained within an ongoing narrative in which the main character is you, the reader. I don't much like the book, but if you do you should read more by Calvino and similar writers such as Borges and several which have been mentioned above (Nabokov, Pynchon). The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner is in sections distinguished by time and style. If you start with Faulkner and Joyce anyway and go through who they influenced you should find more than enough of what you're looking for.

[Heteronym]

I second If on a winter's night a traveller, although I actually preferred the frame narrative to the ten fictional beginnings. Invisible Cities, which I love, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which I detest, may also interest you.

[FrancoisG]

David Foster Wallace : "The boom of the system"

[onioneater]

NIEBLA by Miguel de Unamuno.

[marcolfo]

''aura'' by carlos fuentes, you know since it's about you.

[PeterL]

You might find Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco interesting.

[laymonite]

John Barth's story collection Lost in the Funhouse is a pedantic work of metafiction. Barth is a very passionate teacher of literature.