1001 nights

"Those Sumatran toads...one story frames anoither, which in turn contains another within it, and so on and so on. The French refer to this sort of framing procedure as the mise en abime, the thrust into the abyss. Shaharazad, talking in an attempt to save her life, tells the tale of the hunchback, and that includes the tale of the tailor, and the tailor tells the tale of the barber, and the barber tells his own tale, and within that are the tales of his various unlucky brothers. Such a Chinese-box structure as an organising device in fiction has its counterpart in real life, wherein we are all of us the stories we carry within us, but that master story contains also the stories of our families and friends, and perhaps the newsagent and the postman, and perhaps what the postman told you about his brother and the story the brother was told by a tourist in Italy, and so on. To look at it from an opposite direction, each of us embodies a life story and our stories get inserted into the overarching master stories of other people we know - just as, without having any choice in the matter, we may appear in the dreams of the people we know."

Robert Irwin, in the introduction to Vol. 1.