Robin Hemley, director of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, and Master of Fine Arts candidate Mieke Eerkens will read from Fakes, an anthology of short stories edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

Our bureaucratized culture inundates us with documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. With Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (that’s the full title), Shields and Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered 40 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 21st century.

Hemley, an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on DO-OVER!. He has published seven books, and his stories and essays have appeared in TheNew York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is also the editor of Defunct magazine.

Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer with a Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State University, an Master of Arts from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an Master of Fine Arts in progress at the University of Iowa. She is working on a book about her father's experience as a civilian prisoner in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia during World War II.

The Nonfiction Writing Program, part of the English Department, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a graduate program, are housed within the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.