Fakes by David Shields

In our bureaucratised culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, reports, accidentally forwarded e-mail, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer have gathered forty short fictions that they find to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for our time.