I’m reading Badlands, the latest release from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They have written many books together, most of which deal with recurring characters. In this book, one of the characters mentions listening to audiobooks, including “a couple of good thrillers from Preston and Child.”
It’s common for authors to name check other authors like this but I don’t recall seeing anyone do it for themselves. An
Any other examples you can think of?
Stephen King did it for Stephen King while writing as Richard Bachman, which seems worth a quick mention.
From the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of Ulysses:
— All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
“James I” obviously means “King James the First,” but it can be also read as “James [Joyce] [is] I” (= “I, George William Russell, am serving as a thinly veiled analogue of the author, just like Hamlet did for Shakespeare.”).
Isaac Asimov did this in his BLACK WIDOWERS armchair mysteries, where one of the club members is a writer who — is familiar with his work.
Paul Auster does this more or less continuously throughout City of Glass.
In the second part of El Quijote (a.k.a. Don Quixote), the characters complain that this guy Cervantes got some things wrong about them when he wrote the first part.
Which reminds me of the opening lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Also, in Don Quixote the listed contents of his library contains La Galatea by Cervantes.
And also in Murder at the ABA, where Asimov himself shows up briefly as a character.
In Illuminatus! Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea included a review of Illuminatus! by a fictional critic who gave the book a really bad review.
In Goodnight Moon, there’s a copy of The Runaway Bunny visible on a bookshelf.
(Do The Berenstain Bears qualify?)
Clive Cussler did this excessively in his books.
In later books featuring “The Lincoln Lawyer”, he complains about the movie, annoyed by the publicity and claiming he looks nothing like Matthew McConaughey.
Actually, I do recall that now.
Eugene Ionesco did this in Rhinoceros.
If stage plays count, Woody Allen does this in God (and even makes a cameo appearance by phone).
There’s also a line in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love where the main character mentions a “gauze-stoppered bottle.”
In Trevanian’s novel The Loo Sanction -a character makes a reference to the book The Language of Film by Roger Whitaker and even mention Whitaker’s name.
Roger Whitaker is Trevanian’s real name.
Heller did a bit of this in Closing Time. He also mentions other people, some of whom were still alive at the time, like Kurt Vonnegut.
Heinlein refers to himself in “..And he Built a Crooked House” as “the original Hermit of Hollywood” who lives across the street. The house in the story is across from his own house.
Mercedes Lackey wrote a funny short story whee she’s confronted by her characters over all the awful things she’s done to them (she apologizes to Talia for “the foot thing”). One of them, Herald Myste manages to talk them down. After the rest leave, however there’s an exchange like:
Myste: “Have they figured out that I’m your self-insert character, yet?”
Mercedes ‘Misty’ Lackey: “Not yet.”