Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for centuries. However, as the editors point out in their introduction (itself a kind of fake, being presented as a ‘how to’ guide), ours is an age awash with different types of written communication, from texts, blogs and emails to marketing mailshots, application forms and end-of-year-reports. Any writer inclined to fake it, therefore, has a wide variety of formats to choose from.
And the 40 contributors to this volume certainly make use of the full gamut. There are stories here based upon improbable Twitter feeds (Kari Anne Roy’s ‘Chaucer Tweets the South by Southwest Festival’) and embarrassing misdirected emails (Robin Hemley’s ‘Reply All’), not to mention academic lectures, contracts, letters of complaint (Lydia Davis’s ‘Letter to a Funeral Parlour’) and Amazon reader reviews (Chris Bachelder’s ‘My Beard, Reviewed’).
Some of the formats adopted present formidable obstacles to the creation of fiction of any kind: ‘Life Story’, by David Shields, is composed exclusively of sentences culled from car bumper stickers, while Daniel Orozco’s ‘Officers Weep’, about an extramarital affair in the workplace, is in the form of a police log. Two of the most ingenious pieces are those that bookend the collection, entitled, appropriately, ‘Disclaimer’ and ‘The Index’: the former, by David Means, is a denial of real-life resemblance so vivid as to make the story it would precede redundant, while the latter, by J.G. Ballard, is the index to the ‘lost’ autobiography of a man who, though unheard of, appears to have been ‘one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century’.
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