Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts
Matthew Vollmer
(Editor)
David Shields
(Editor)
Description
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.Product Details
Price
$18.95
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date
October 15, 2012
Pages
368
Dimensions
5.92 X 7.81 X 1.22 inches | 0.01 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780393341959
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Matthew Vollmer is the author of Future Missionaries of America, a collection of stories, as well as Inscriptions for Headstones, a collection of essays. He is the editor of A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which collects invocations from over sixty acclaimed and emerging authors, and with David Shields is co-editor of Fakes; An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared in a range of anthologies and magazines, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech.
David Shields is the author of fifteen books, including the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead; Reality Hunger, named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications; and Black Planet, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty languages.