Fakes An Anthology Of Pseudo Interviews Faux Lectures Quasi Letters Found Texts And Other Fraudulent Artifacts

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.

This volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy.

Other People is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays that form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but an intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness. Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, what function does art serve? Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields sustains a piercing focus on the multiplicity of perspectives, the irreducible log jam of human information, and the possibilities and impossibilities for human connection.

An inspiring guide to the practices of contemporary experimental creative writing, this book explores experimentation within both traditional writing genres and 'post-genre' modes such as hybrid texts, Non-creative writing, textual materiality, creative re-purposing, performance and new media technologies. Combining the practices, history, social context, and philosophical backgrounds of experimental work with a broad anthology of models in-book and online, Experimental Writing gives you the toolkit of techniques and skills to confidently engage with forms previously perceived as intimidating so that you can reinvigorate your craft. In addition, the book includes sections on new approaches to the workshop model, emphasis on community and collaboration, and institutional critique. These chapters will provide you with a “big picture” perspective and the motivation to question the templates you work within, giving you the where-with-all to shape your own ideals for writing, no matter what their stylistic choices. Within its broad scope, Experimental Writing covers: - a comprehensive survey of relevant movements, texts, authors, and techniques of non-traditional forms - a survey of evolving trends with exemplars of how genres can be disrupted to help you appreciate experimental styles - demonstrations of how more diverse and innovative pedagogical interventions have the potential to inspire your creativity and create more original work - an examination of the institutional forces that have shaped the creative writing landscape you inhabit, to prompt you to re-examine the pressures, cultural biases, and power structures that have shaped both your aesthetic vision and potential future career paths - frameworks for independent research, practitioner interviews, and motivating questions to get you thinking and questioning before you encounter each new topic With each chapter accompanied by stimulating pedagogical features such as a timeline of experimental writing, free writes, games and constraints, reflections, exercises, prompts and case studies throughout, this invaluable text reveals wider horizon for your artistic endeavors and will activate your critical thinking about a range of issues and ideas. Additional online resources for this book can be found at http://www.bloomsburyonlineresources.com/experimental-writing-a-writers-guide-and-anthology.

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

This book discusses the complex ways in which the novel offers a vibrant arena for critically engaging with our contemporary world and scrutinises the genre's political, ethical, and aesthetic value. Far-reaching cultural, political, and technological changes during the past two decades have created new contexts for the novel, which have yet to be accounted for in literary studies. Addressing the need for fresh transdisciplinary approaches that explore these developments, the book focuses on the multifaceted responses of the novel to key global challenges, including migration and cosmopolitanism, posthumanism and ecosickness, human and animal rights, affect and biopolitics, human cognition and anxieties of inattention, and the transculturality of terror. By doing so, it testifies to the ongoing cultural relevance of the genre. Lastly, it examines a range of 21st-century Anglophone novels to encourage new critical discourses in literary studies.

Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter is not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get will get an anthology; a course’s worth of writing exercises; a rally for compression, concision, and velocity in an increasingly digital, post-religious age; and a meditation on the brevity of human existence. 1. We are mortal beings. 2. There is no god. 3. We live in a digital culture. 4. Art is related to the body and to the culture. 5. Art should reflect these things. 6. Brevity rules. The book’s 40 contributors include Donald Barthelme, Kate Chopin, Lydia Davis, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Safran Foer, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, Wayne Koestenbaum, Anne Lamott, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Dinty W. Moore, George Orwell, Jayne Anne Phillips, George Saunders, Lauren Slater, James Tate, and Paul Theroux.

Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life; his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art. The stay-at-home dad (three young girls) and the workaholic writer (eighteen books) head to the woods to spend four days together in a cabin, arguing life vs. art. I Think You’re Totally Wrong is an impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate. Shields and Powell talk about everything—marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal, and (of course) writers and writing—in the name of exploring and debating their central question: the lived life versus the examined life. There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters of the universe—only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish. James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong, starring the authors, premiered in 2015.