In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, it is mentioned in passing that Anna is writing a book. Carmen Boullosa has taken this idea and written what amounts to a fan fiction. The main characters are new, but they do interact with characters from the original novel. There are some mind-bending metafictional effects too – the characters from Anna Karenina know they are fictional, and the other characters know it too, and it is a point of discussion amongst them. Tolstoy himself appears as well, unsurprisingly having a rough time being in the page instead of writing it.
The book doesn’t really have the same feel as Anna Karenina. I wonder if that’s because the original (El libro de Ana) was written in Spanish rather than Russian. I suppose it would be difficult to translate a book from Spanish and make it sound Russian. Maybe if you first translated it to Russian, then to English… anyway. The one slightly disappointing thing about The Book of Anna is that Anna’s book (two books really) hardly figures in the plot, although the entirety of Anna’s book (revised for this novel) is presented as part of the The Book of Anna. It’s a definite departure from the main story and makes this book stand out on its own.