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