Ages before I saw the movie one of my sister's boyfriends was trying to convince me that the mark of a good novel was long paragraphs.

Really? I recently hit a two-page-long paragraph in Midnight's Children. Now I know I'm reading a good novel!

yeah my sister has had some wacky boyfriends. He was right about Goldman, though.

There's also an official "good parts" version of The Princess Bride - selected bits printed in, I think, red.

I've read The Silent Gondoliers. It's okay.

Hey Aimee, when I read The Princess Bride it didn't even occur to me that the stuff about Morganstern and the lawsuit and all that was fictional. I can't remember how I ended up finding out the truth.

But seriously, nobody should feel stupid for making that mistake - it's a tribute to how well Goldman pulls it off that so many people fall for it.

Also, hi! I can't believe I've been out of the thread for two years. I'm an English teacher--what's wrong with me?

I may have just answered my own question.

Jostein Gaarder uses a similar technique in Aemelia Flora, supposedly a letter to St. Augustine from his abandoned lover/mother of his son. Gaarder presents this as a translation of a work he somehow found by pure chance, translated, then submitted to the Vatican (or something) for their records. Sadly, he didn't get a receipt, and the Vatican (or whatever) had no record of ever receiving such a manuscript. I was so intrigued by the "back story" and so frustrated by the lack of any real manuscript to translate myself that I tossed the book aside in disgust and dismay. I want it to be real!

I really should try to read it again.

I had completely forgotten that Eco used that in Name of the Rose. One of my favorite authors, even if it takes me 2 chapters to figure out what he's on about. My favorite of his is his book of essays-How to Travel With a Salmon.

My favorite version of that is The Handmaid's Tale. The background is supposed to be that the story was constructed from audio cassettes recorded by the narrator that were found unlabelled all jumbled together so the order had to be guessed at.

I guess it's less likely to fool you when the setting is the future, but it's pretty nifty.

It's a very common literary technique. In fact, the earliest novels were often epistolatory novels which operated under that conceit - that you'd stumbled across a stash of letters in your grandmother's attic.

Fantasy and science fiction novels in particular favor that trope.

Lots of "rediscovered" Sherlock Holmes stories are tales that the "editor" found when he stumbled across a stash of Watson's papers. Personally, I find the "footnotes" that get put in those stories--I'm looking at you, Nicholas Meyers--to be masterbatory self-indulgence, because anyone familiar with Holmes knows the "editor" didn't spend hours toiling over some eccentricity in Watson's handwriting.