The powerHouse Arena invites you to
a discussion and signing

FAKES

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

with anthology editor
Matthew Vollmer

featuring readings by contributors:
Samantha Hunt
Caron A. Levis
Laura Jayne Martin
Joseph Salvatore

Thursday, October 25, 7–9 PM
The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
For more information, please call 718.666.3049
RSVP appreciated: RSVP@powerHouseArena.com

Editor Matthew Vollmer will discuss Fakes, a collection of fiction disguised as nonfiction. Contributors Samantha Hunt, Caron A. Levis, Laura Jayne Martin, and Joseph Salvatore read from the anthology.

About FAKES:

Contemporary short stories enacting giddy, witty revenge on the documents that define and dominate our lives.

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.

About the Contributors:

Samantha Hunt is a writer and an artist. She is the author of The Invention of Everything Else.

Caron Levis was born, raised, and currently lives in NYC where works as an arts educator in the city's public schools. Permission Slip, is the first in a series of stories inspired by moments in the classroom. Listed in the Best American Non-required Reading series, it was originally published by Fence Magazine and selected by Lynn Tillman as the winner of the SLS fiction contest. Other stories in the series have been published by The New Guard Review, Persea Books, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first children's picture book, Stuck with the Blooz, has just been released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As noted by Kirkus Reviews,"The Blooz just might be the perfect concrete visual to help everyone get through those cranky days." You can find her at www.caronlevis.com.

Laura Jayne Martin is a writer for Thought Catalog who lives in New York City. Her work has been featured on McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Splitsider, The Hairpin, Slacktory, Crushable, and elsewhere. She also wrote the screenplay the film Chemistry (2008) and the new award-winning script Delivery Girl (2012). She has many likes and dislikes—all the normal ones.

Joseph Salvatore has published work in, among other places, Dossier Journal, HOW Journal, New York Tyrant, Open City, Post Road, Salt Hill, Willow Springs, and The New York Times Sunday Book Review. He an assistant professor at The New School, where he founded their literary journal, LIT. And he is an associate book review editor for The Brooklyn Rail. His debut collection of short stories, To Assume a Pleasing Shape, from BOA Editions, was published in 2011.

Matthew Vollmer is the author of Future Missionaries of America, a collection of short fiction, and inscriptions for headstones, a collection of 30 essays, each one crafted as an epitaph, and each unfolding in a single sentence. He teaches at Virginia Tech, where he directs the undergraduate creative writing program.

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