Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780393341959)

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.

Author: David Shields
ISBN-10: 039334195X
ISBN-13: 9780393341959
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 10/15/2012
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 7.81h x 5.92w x 1.22d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/20/2012 pg. 32
Booklist 09/01/2012 pg. 40
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2012