Narrative via dialogue

[dahosek]

I'm looking for contemporary (I know Joseph Conrad very well, thank you), fiction in which a story is told in dialogue (and while I don't want pointers at Conrad, that's kind of the thing that I'm looking for). Pretty much I'm looking for good cases of someone conveying plot by telling a story to another character. I've got two works in progress where I'm struggling with this, one where I want to do this partly for stylistic reasons (and also because part of the plot is the listener's reaction to the story), and one where it's necessary for plot reasons (the person telling the story is lying and I want the fact that the story is given in dialogue to be a subtle clue to that fact).

[Danger Jane]

...Interview with a Vampire, by Ann Rice?

[dahosek]

I'll take a look at that, although I'm thinking that I'd like something that's a bit more of a subplot than the main plot... what happens outside that narration (before and after) is just as important as the narration itself.

[Danger Jane]

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

[apmom]

Shipwreck, by Louis Begley. copywright 2003, if that helps.

:)

[JB_Finesse]

Several parts of Stephen King's It have "interviews" in them.

[dahosek]

Just a quick note of thanks (even to the people who missed the word "contemporary"--I'll probably do something similar very soon myself). I think I've managed to find a good solution to the narrative problem (certainly, the feedback on the short story from my writing group was positive).

For the record, I ended up reading Deception by Philip Roth and Shipwreck by Louis Begley. A curious overlap in subject matter between the two, although I have to say that I by far preferred the Roth (not to mention it was also more helpful in helping me figure out how to approach what I was trying to do).