About the book

In our bureaucratized culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered forty short fictions that they’ve found to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes—including ones by Ron Carlson (a personal ad), Amy Hempel (a complaint to the parking department), Rick Moody (Works Cited), and Lydia Davis (a letter to a funeral parlor)—trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for the twenty-first century.

Praise

“For those bored with the more stodgy ‘best of’ collections of literary fiction, this book is an entertaining escape into that absurd realm of writing where ‘fake’ can be a good thing.” —T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post

“This anthology gathers not so much artifacts as artifices: nobody would mistake its fake letters, lists, and essays for real, but all of them hum with a finely burnished unreality.  The collection is just fun.” —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe