Fiction Collective Two
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Fiction Collective Two is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of avant-garde, experimental fiction (often postmodern in nature) supported in part by Florida State University, the Florida Arts Council, Illinois State University, the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and private contributors.
FC2 has executive offices at the Florida State University, where the managing editor Brenda Mills and acting publisher R.M. Berry have offices. Book production (generally six new books a year and four reprints) occurs at the Publications Unit of Illinois State University, and distribution and marketing are handled by University of Alabama Press.
Author Lance Olsen is currently the chair of the Board of Directors, and in 2005 the Editorial Board consisted of Alan Singer, C.W. Cannon, Kate Bernheimer, Lily James, Matthew Roberson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Doug Rice, Lidia Yuknavitch, Larry Fondation, and Larry McCaffery.
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[edit] History
The precursor to FC2, the Fiction Collective, was founded in 1973 by Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, Mark Mirsky, Steve Katz, and Ronald Sukenick, among others, allegedly forming the first US not-for-profit publishing collective run by authors themselves[1]. According to Sukenick, the Fiction Collective was intended to "make serious novels and story collections available in simultaneous hard and quality paper editions...and will keep them in print permanently." [1] Although geographically disparate (including members in California and Colorado), the offices of the Fiction Collective were located at Brooklyn College. They established distribution in the fall of 1974, utilizing George Braziller, a distributor of European fiction. For the remainder of the 1970s and much of the 80s the Fiction Collective published steadily (usually around six books a year), deriving support from The New York State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1986, reductions in arts funding enacted by the Reagan administration resulted in denial of the Fiction Collective's NEA grant application. Furthermore, during this period, the organization was struggling with decision-making and management issues. In 1989, Curtis White, Ronald Sukenick, Mark Leyner, Jonathan Baumbach, B. H. Friedman, and Peter Spielberg decided to reorganize the press, thus founding Fiction Collective Two ("FC2").
The new press began once again to receive National Endowment for the Arts funding in the mid-nineties.
[edit] Literary Impact
Since its founding, FC2 has published about 180 books. They have been mentioned in the "top books" of The Nation, Publishers Weekly, The Village Voice and The New York Times Book Review. FC2 authors Clarence Major, Gerald Vizenor and Diane Glancy were included in the most recent Norton Anthology of American Literature. Curtis White, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Gerald Vizenor, Mark Leyner and Samuel Delany were also included in Postmodern Literature: A Norton Anthology. In 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored founder Ronald Sukenik with the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, stating "He has been an explorer, a courageous adventurer, and an absolutely necessary component of American literature."
[edit] Notable Authors
- Kate Bernheimer
- Mark Leyner
- Samuel Delany
- Diane Williams
- Yuriy Tarnawsky
- Michael Joyce
- Stephen Graham Jones
[edit] External links
- FC2 website
- History of the Fiction Collective and FC2
- CLMP article about FC2 and the future of independent presses
