If the faux reviews in A Perfect Vacuum—from the Joycean pastiche of “Gigamesh” to the desert-island send-up in “Les Robinsonades”—delighted you with their self-aware games, you’ll relish how If on a winter’s night a traveler turns you, the Reader, into a character who keeps starting new books that keep interrupting themselves. Calvino’s nested openings and direct addresses scratch the same itch as Lem’s mock-critical frame, but with a more story-forward, puzzle-box momentum.

Loved how Lem’s imaginary prefaces skewer authors, critics, and grand theories—say, the way “Gigamesh” parodies scholastic exegesis? Pale Fire is a whole novel built from a poem plus footnotes by the wildly unreliable Charles Kinbote, whose commentary hijacks the text with vanity and delusion. You’ll savor the same wicked wit and scholarly parody, just funneled into a single, dazzlingly comic voice.

If the pseudo-bibliographies and thought experiments in A Perfect Vacuum—like the reductio-ad-absurdum logic games and taxonomies of nonexistent books—were your jam, Ficciones offers crystalline parables that play the same metafictional-philosophical game. Stories such as “The Library of Babel” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” turn ideas about authorship, infinity, and interpretation into mind-bending narratives.

If you enjoyed how A Perfect Vacuum masquerades as criticism—complete with scholarly tones and in-jokes—House of Leaves pushes that apparatus to the brink: a documentary study of a film that may not exist, annotated by editors and a troubled narrator. The footnotes, appendices, and typographic labyrinth echo Lem’s mock-review conceit while spinning it into a haunting narrative puzzle.

If the intellectual delight of A Perfect Vacuum—its constraints, catalogues of imaginary works, and clever structural conceits—hooked you, Perec’s masterwork will thrill you. He maps an entire Parisian apartment block square by square, using Oulipian constraints to orchestrate stories-within-stories; it offers that same exhilarating, puzzle-loving payoff you got from Lem’s tour of fabricated books.