Highly recommended to anyone who teaches creative writing to undergrads or feels like they're in a rut with their own stuff. So many ideas in here, so many examples of fictional forms other than the conventional story. Cleverness abounds throughout of course but when these work well it's clear that unconventional form restriction inspired the writer in a way that might also excite a reader. Classics in here I've read elsewhere include pieces by Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthleme, George Saunders, St...

I own the hardcover first printing of Stanley Crawford's Some Instructions to My Wife and liked the book very much, so in full disclosure about the Stanley Crawford piece that was included in this book Fakes here, I say that I couldn't read it for the font. The font hurt my eyes, this typeface they chose. But I had already read the Crawford piece in a hardcover book years ago and wasn't going to read the text fully again anyway, but I did want to scan the bit and found I couldn't even try to rea...

When I finished this collection I was sad. Not because there were no more amazing stories to be read. Not just because each one of these stories exhibited my own talents to be so grossly lacking. SImply because there's a good chance that never, not in the history of publishing nor the thirty or so years I have left to witness, see a collection so closely aimed to my personal tastes. Fantastic.

The stories in this collection truly show what can be achieved outside of the traditional plot structure. That means there are stories that are really fantastic and clever in here. It also means there's a lot of pieces that miss the mark completely. Stories that will leave you asking: what is the point of it all?

Honestly the tags say it all. This is a nerd book. This is a book you will enjoy if you are a nerd about language and the forms it can take. This is not a normal short-story book, but I enjoyed it anyway.Now, when I say I enjoyed it, I mean for the most part. I found that a few of the stories took the joke and ran with it way too long, to the point where I had to skip to the end because it was just getting repetitive. Most of them, however, were just long enough to make their point and several w...

From an interview I did, for the Tottenville Review, with Matthew Volmer:Matthew Vollmer is the author of two short story collections: the critically lauded Future Missionaries of America, a beautifully crafted sampling of spiritual longing and religious legacies amidst the lives of contemporary Americans, and, still fresh from the presses, Inscriptions for Headstones, an ambitious, poetic, and really quite singular work. There’s nothing else like it in the world. Close on the heels of his lates...

I have a deep well in my heart for artifact fiction, and this anthology, often considered one of the best collections of the genre (and I have a signed copy, no less) didn't hit the right notes for me consistently: some great pieces, like the ones by Charles Yu, George Saunders, Laura Jayne Martin, Charles McLeod, but a bunch of others were disappointing. Oh, great, I get to read about Jonathan Safran Foer discuss birds again, whoopee. The ToC here is studded with all-star writers, which I almos...

The pieces by George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Daniel Orozco are world-beaters, but much of the rest of this collection is really disappointing. Some all but ignore their chosen structure to tell their story (more often than not, about an unhappy love life or a marriage falling apart - the original style doesn't often reflect original substance), some are unsurprising epistolary stories (a genre that the introduction and further reading list seems to think was invented...

My friend Cathy Fleischer (and Sarah Andrew-Vaughn) wrote a book called Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone: Helping Students Navigate Unfamiliar Genres, based on research they had done in their classrooms. Several ideas are at work in their project; one is clearly that students need to learn various genres of writing. Another is that teachers typically teach one genre at a time, whether you are good at it or not. Why not invite students to pick a genre with with they are unfamiliar, learn as much...

I rated this book 3.75/5 stars on InsatiableBooksluts.com. A review copy was provided by the publisher.Review excerpt:"This anthology caught my eye because of a review I read in the LARB (and by "read," I mostly mean skimmed). The concept of the book revolves around the "fraudulent artifacts" in the title; it reminds me of a cross among blogs like Letters of Note, which contains real artifacts giving us fascinating peeks at people and situations via correspondence, pieces from McSweeney's Intern...

Clever and creative. Much fails for me but I think I just soemtimes miss the humour. What does work for me, works well.

Originally drawn to this collection because it contains pieces by many authors whose works I’ve enjoyed, I was at first confused by the use of the terms “fake” and “fraudulent” in the title, but the introduction immediately clarified that these pieces were fictional examples of the use of specific formats which are usually employed for real-world purposes. Most of these showed a degree of cleverness and were moderately amusing. A few were more engaging, hinting at larger stories of human dreams

Grrr. This is the only book I brought with me today, for when I finished Red Scarf Girl. Something light and amusing, I thought, for after the downer.Well, it is light, in the sense that it is printed on really cheap paper, and thus, despite being a thick trade edition, it doesn't weigh much. And then after an introduction that explains how to make fakes (but not why to anthologize them), the very first entry is "Disclaimer" about an abused and murdered woman, which should not be confused with a...

Could you trust a review of fakes?

Some of these are really fun. There are, though, a lot of uses of forms which are turned towards a more standard short-story format, rather than having their own form explored. The former become tiresome.

Great fun. A few duds, but mostly funny and touching, and inspiring for writers.

The most moving piece is McLeod's National Treasures which is a galloping biography (possibly) of some heartbreaking and sometimes darkly humorous episodes. .ost of the other 40 bits while often entertaining share a rather cutesy motif that begins to rankle like a basic blues pattern that just repeats over and over. Despite some playful formatting the exercise gets a touch tiresome. But I have enjoyed other of Shields' works.

This was the assigned text in a creative writing class I took on "new genres." We were not just talking about fake artifacts and borrowed forms so in a way it was unfortunate that the text dealt exclusively with that. It is a decent text, though I think the newer book is more literary.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...That said, this one had two brilliant examples that alone were worth the price of the book. Lydia Davis' classic letter to a Funeral Parlour (I love her so much).... and as i...

Like with many anthologies that are collected around a specific formal practice in writing, this book varies in quality. Some selections are really top-notch, but others are almost worthy of skipping. The idea behind them all is creative writing that is in the format of some non-creative text: for-sale listings, book indexes, wills, police logs, etc. Where these work the best is, I believe, not dependent on the the form the writer chose to cleverly lampoon, but on the actual content. When the st...

2.5/5. Any anthology is a mixed bag, and there are a handful of essays I’ve bookmarked (always love Kevin Wilson’s Laconic Method short story). I’m just not sure that, overall, this hermit crab style lends itself as well to fiction as it does for creative nonfiction. There were many pieces that felt hollow and pretentious to me, and I ended up skipping a number of the pieces after a few paragraphs.