Fakes · An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

**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.

With contributions by:

David Means

George Saunders

Stanley Crawford

Mark Halliday

Charles Yu

Caron A. Levis

Lorrie Moore

Kevin Wilson

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Amy Hempel

Donald Barthelme

Joe Wenderoth

Laura Jayne Martin

Ron Carlson

Chris Bachelder

Rob Cohen

Mieke Eerkens

Joseph Salvatore

Daniel Orozco

Greg Burnham

Jack Pendarvis

Robin Hemley

Kari Anne Roy

Rachel B. Glaser

Wendy Brenner

Lucas Cooper

Samantha Hunt

Charles McLeod

Matthew Williamson

Arda Collins

David Shields

Melanie Rae Thon

Matthew Vollmer

Lydia Davis

Paul Theroux

Rick Moody

Michael Martone

J. Robert Lennon

Jonathan Safran Foer

J. G. Ballard