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

David Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College's low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina.

"For those bored with the more stodgy 'best of' collections of literary fiction, this book is an entertaining escape into that absurd realm of writing where 'fake' can be a good thing."--T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post

"This anthology gathers not so much artifacts as artifices: nobody would mistake its fake letters, lists, and essays for real, but all of them hum with a finely burnished unreality.  The collection is just fun." Kate Tuttle--Boston Globe

"Cleverness abounds. The hits are very good indeed."--Publishers Weekly

"The false artifact seems to be experiencing a renaissance, and Shields and Vollmer have done us a favor with the new anthology Fakes, a solid collection that illuminates the possibilities of this form of mimicry. Humor with a dash of pathos seems to be the desired effect of most of the pieces. The inherent tension between what the text purports to be (real) and what the reader knows it to be (not real) lends itself to irony, if not outright satire."--Michelle Crouch, The Rumpus

"A compendium of fictional satires, parodies, and other attempts to transform commonplace forms into literary art. These stories suggest future directions for storytelling, and Shields and Vollmer convincingly press the necessity of the task; these pieces represent 'our oft-repressed language staging a rebellion.'"--Kirkus Reviews

"Certifiably inauthentic, but in a good way."--Seattle Times

"Shields joins forces with writer Vollmer to prove that creative use of form can be a delightful way to tell stories. These imaginative short stories demonstrate how much plot, character, and feeling can be revealed in documents and ephemera we consider dull and routine."--Sarah Hunter, Booklist