March 12, 1997
In 1989, the Fiction Collective was reorganized as FC2 and its offices were
moved from Brooklyn to the University of Colorado at Boulder and to
Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. Since this reorganization,
FC2 has continued its interest in formal literary experimentation, but it
has also become increasingly engaged with other kinds of socially
marginalized thinking. In 1988, FC2 along with the University of Colorado
established the Nilon Prize for Excellence in Minority Fiction. This
contest has been a venue for some of the most remarkable minority writers
in this country, including Melvin Dixon, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Diane Glancy,
Yvonne Sapia, Omar Castaneda, and Ivan Webster. Two of these books, Yvonne
Sapia's Valentino's Hair and Ivan Webster's Cares of the Day were named
among the best books of fiction for their respective years by Publishers
Weekly.
FC2 has also become increasingly involved in publishing gay/lesbian/bi
writers, especially those who work in formally difficult styles. We have
published since 1988, the work of Melvin Dixon, Lou Robinson, Jacques
Servin, Samuel Delany and, in anthologies such as Avant-Pop and Chick-Lit,
the work of Carole Maso, Jill St. Jacques, Tristan Tormino, and Lidia
Yuknavitch.
FC2 has worked diligently to give unconventional women writers a forum for
their ideas through two related projects, On the Edge: New Women's Fiction
and our Chick-Lit anthologies. On the Edge has published books by Cris
Mazza, Kathryn Thompson and Rosaire Appel. In the fall of 1998, Lily
James' collection The Great Taste of Straight People will mark the first
publication of one of our post-feminist "chick" discoveries.
Finally, through our controversial Black Ice Books imprint, FC2 has sought
to represent the often troubling vision of white, dissident, youth culture.
This series was conceived to appeal to writers and readers who could be
described as slackers, punks, gen-xers, and cyberpunks. Much of this
literature is rough, anti-literary, and provocative. It is, as we say in
our promotional materials, "Not for everyone." It is certainly not for the
American Family Association and it may not be for congressional
representatives. Nonetheless, these young writers, in our opinion, deserve
the opportunity to speak and be heard.
In the words of Michael BŽrubŽ, writing in the journal Critique, FC2
"performs the critical task of sustaining this nation's weirder literary
heritages against the logic of Time-Warner and the Sears Financial Network,
which will foster "novelty" only so long as it is quickly succeeded by more
"novelty."...As a nonprofit "cutting edge" press, it is of signal and
lasting consequence that FC2 be a literally "conservative" force for the
preservation and transmission of avant-pops, neo-mods, and unclassifieds
everywhere."
In a culture that has become increasingly oppressive, artists have become a
sort of endangered species. The question is whether our culture will
continue to have the largeness of spirit to allow people who are different,
who don't think like the leaders of the American Family Association, to
live. Or whether, like Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the
culture will be mis-led into saying, "Exterminate the brutes!"
Pretend until it's true.
FC2, originally the Fiction Collective, was created in 1974 as an author
administered and edited nonprofit publishing house located at Brooklyn
College. Among its founding authors were Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan
Baumbach, Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Federman.
Originally, the Fiction Collective was responding to the increasing
narrowness of aesthetic vision among the mainstream commercial literary
presses. The Fiction Collective sought to create an outlet for formal,
literary experimentation.