Literary Cameos

Literary Cameos

This article relates to The Reservation

In Rebecca Kauffman's novel The Reservation, the titular restaurant booking is for a group that includes bestselling author John Grisham. This isn't the first time a novelist has chosen to feature a guest appearance by another author—here are some other notable literary cameos for readers to discover.

Mark Twain in Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back
Brock's debut novel is a time-travel story about the birth of baseball. A present-day San Francisco journalist gets on a train and is transported to 1869. He joins the Cincinnati Red Stockings baseball team and has a chance encounter with none other than Mark Twain.

Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and others in Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody
This historical novel, based on the real-life story of Jessie Redmon Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis magazine, is set in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to Fauset's professional and romantic relationship with her boss, W.E.B. Du Bois, the novel also features cameos by a young Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen.

Leon Trotsky in Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna
Kingsolver's novel centers on a budding (fictional) writer named Harrison Shepherd, who grows up in Mexico in the 1920s and returns there in the 1930s, when he befriends artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as well as Russian revolutionary, politician, and author Leon Trotsky.

Vladimir Nabokov in Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz
This noir detective novel is set in 1922, in an alternate-history version of the United States where a murder threatens to derail the successful but fragile racial integration in the bustling Native-led city of Cahokia, Illinois. Near the end of the novel, readers will notice a Russian family traveling through the Cahokia railway station, fleeing a civil war at home—one of them is a young Vladimir Nabokov.

Louise Erdrich in Louise Erdrich's The Sentence
This ghost novel is set in a haunted Minneapolis bookstore that bears an uncanny resemblance to Birchbark Books, the bookstore Erdrich herself owns—and in fact, the author appears as a minor character in several scenes.

Beatrix Potter in Christian Heidicker's Scary Stories for Young Foxes
You might think of Beatrix Potter as the author and illustrator of cozy picture books starring cuddly anthropomorphized animals. In this children's horror novel, however, Heidicker casts Potter as a terrifyingly cold-hearted villain who hunts and entraps animals, keeping them in cages indefinitely and punishing them for misbehaving, explaining to a fox kit that "I'm going to make it so that you live forever" in the pages of her books.

Filed under Reading Lists

This article relates to The Reservation. It first ran in the March 11, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.