"Since listicles have become the new popular form of supplementary text, here are the top five paratext novels that have been buzzfeeding around my brain.
1. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: The paratext urtext, or at least the best known, Charles Kinbote’s deranged commentary on John Shade’s 999-line poem features, on its first page, this non-sequitur: “[John Shade] preserved the date of actual creation rather than that of second or third thoughts. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.” Kinbote’s first interjection here is absurd, hilarious, and even violent in how it forces himself into someone else’s story. As with Lolita, the narrative hinges on control. In that earlier novel, Humbert Humbert not only controls Dolores Haze physically but narratively as well, since he is the one allowed a voice. In Pale Fire, Nabokov more explicitly curates, but also balances, this dynamic, revealing John Shade’s story — the tragic loss of his daughter that is the impetus for the poem — before Kinbote tries to absorb it into, and suppresses it with, his own story. It wasn’t until I read Claire Messud’s reminiscent The Woman Upstairs — about a schoolteacher who becomes obsessed with her student’s family — that I realized Kinbote is not just infiltrating Shade’s art; he’s infiltrating Shade’s family."

3. Mushroom madness: It’s all in the quest
September 11, 2013 Jennifer Eremeeva, special to RBTH http://rbth.ru/arts/2013/09/11/mushroom_madness_its_all_in_the_quest_29733.html

"In a way, mushrooms are like T.J. MAXX: you get designer food at rock bottom prices. Is it the unpredictability of the search: the never knowing what you’ll find under the next fir tree?
Or is it the thrill of the chase as Vladimir Nabokov (before he explored other obsessions) described his mother’s mushroom madness in Speak, Memory?
“Her main delight was in the quest. […] As she came nearer from under the dripping trees and caught sight of me, her face would show an odd, cheerless expression, which might have spelled poor luck, but which I knew was the tense, jealously contained beatitude of the successful hunter.”
Nabokov’s mother never spent any time in the kitchen with her mushrooms: “…they were bundled away by a servant to a place she knew nothing about, to a doom that did not interest her,” but don’t let that deter you!"