Fakes
An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts
Published on 25. April 2025
362 pages
978-0-393-34606-0 (ISBN)
Description
Contemporary short stories enacting giddy, witty revenge on the documents that define and dominate our lives.
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.More details
Other editions
Additional editions
David Shields | Matthew Vollmer
Fakes
An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts
Book
10/2012
WW Norton & Co
€18.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Persons
David Shields, the author of
Reality Hunger, is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington.
