Next to Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is probably the best known story in this style in the English language.
I think you could put a lot of the Bible in this category, as it’s presented as first-person accounts by prophets (OT) or apostles (NT), but was in reality composed long after the fact.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is told in the form of a journal, interrupted by a series of letters, interrupted by a mystery novel, interrupted by a film, interrupted by a recording of an interrogation, interrupted by a spoken tale.
silenus mentioned The Flashman Papers already, but I wanted to add that the original novel fooled several US reviewers into thinking it was nonfiction.
Alessan mentioned Gene Wolfe, but I’ll add the Latro novels, which include the trick of an academic forward by the “translator”.
Robert Graves’ Claudius novels are supposedly secret memoirs by an emperor.
I can’t remember any full-length novels by Stephen King that are exclusively made up of false documents, but he does like to use newspaper articles for verisimilitude. His “Survivor Type” short story is in diary form.
Brooks’ World War Z is made up of interviews.
The Watchmen by Moore, Gibbons, and Higgins not only has newspaper and magazine articles that add historical details for the fictional world, the story is matched to a fictional horror comic.
Personally, I like the approach of adding false documents to create a feeling of realism. Frasier’s footnotes add a lot of welcome detail to the Flashman novels, in my opinion, although the happenings are so unlikely the books are kind of campy. King’s use is quite good, and are a part of his strength as an author of making wild weirdness seem like it could have happened to ordinary people in ordinary locations-- other tricks he employs are slang and brand names.
While I like Graves and Wolfe very much, I think that the examples I gave were weaker. The passage where Claudius talks about how he’ll ensure that his manuscript will be unearthed in the far future rings false for me. The Latro books are excellent, my favorites of Wolfe’s books, but the claim that they were unearthed did nothing for me. By the third novel, the author claiming that another manuscript was miraculously found was too much of a stretch.
Two examples.
First, the one I’m reading now with some students: the stupendously rip-roaring children’s book The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. It’s the main character’s memoir, and she repeatedly mentions that it was based on the extensive diary she kept during a fateful sea journey. If you have the slightest interest in children’s novels and/or nautical tales, check it out.
Second, a novel similar to, though less accessible (and IMO better) than World War Z, is Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. Like WWZ, it’s a collection of anthropological records. Always Coming Home is the work of an anthropologist who studied a tribal culture living in coastal California some 100,000 years in the future.
The Princess Bride is presented as a digest of a scholarly book.
El mecanoscripte del segon origen (Mechanoscript of the second origin), a science fiction novel written in Catalan which has recently been filmed (Fernando Trueba’s final work) is presented as the protagonist’s journal and has an afterword from a scholar talking about it as a very old book.
The Moonstone.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which I’m currently reading, is done this way. Twain meets the Yankee on a tour of a castle in England, and gathers that he has a tale to tell; after suitable persuasion of the liquid variety, the Yankee produces a manuscript copy of his adventures, which Twain shares with us, the reader.
Not the whole thing, but Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie is heavily interspersed with faux-military and -governmental reports after the fact, to give it a touch of verisimilitude and (in King’s own words) to stretch it into more respectable novel length.
Funny thing is, it totally works.
“The Documents in the Case” by Dorothy L. Sayers
Blush. No, I just tend to rush through things…
A few of Heinlein’s juveniles are presented this way. Both Time for the Stars and Podkayne of Mars purport to be diaries written by the protagonists. In the first, the author comments on the journal writing process and in the second the annoying younger sibling writes hidden messages in the diary that the reader is privy to.
Now that I have a bit more time to post
“Flowers for Algernon” Daniel Keyes Moran (diaries)
“Secret Unattainable” A. E. Van Vogt (memos, etc.)
“Computers Don’t Argue” Gordon Dickson (memos, letters, etc.)
“macs” Terry Bisson (interview answers (but not the questions))
The Anderson Tapes is terrific, since the gimmick is that various low-lifes are each under half-assed surveillance, such that the reader can follow the intercepted dialogue as to just how the entire heist is being planned but any individual wiretapper only gets a small and misleading piece of the puzzle.
This may not qualify exactly based on the OP, but King did write one book which is 80 percent a retelling of a story: The Wind Through the Keyhole. The vast majority of the book is a character telling a story within a story.
So is Wizard and Glass.
Emergence, by David R. Palmer, is written as the diary of a girl surviving in a post-apocalyptic world. One of my favorite SF novels.
Something that comes close to this idea happens in movies, where the bulk of the movie is presented as you would expect, and then ends with a voice-over which makes it all sound like it was intended to be a narrative: Terminator, for example.
That’s an even better example … something like 95 percent of that one is a character telling a story.
The diary of one protagonist makes up a good chunk of Gone Girl.
Spoilers follow:
Not only are we reading her diary, but is a diary that has been carefully faked in order to frame him. A false document in every way.
Technically doesn’t *The Canterbury Tales *use this device also the stories are related as part of a story telling contest during a journey.