Fiction Collective Two - History

History

The precursor to FC2, the Fiction Collective, was founded in 1974 by Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, B. H. Friedman, Mark Jay Mirsky, Steve Katz, and Ronald Sukenick, among others. It formed the first US not-for-profit publishing collective run by innovative authors and for innovative authors. According to Sukenick, the Fiction Collective was intended to "make serious novels and story collections available in simultaneous hard and quality paper editions" and to "keep them in print permanently." Although geographically disparate (including members in California and Colorado), the offices of the Fiction Collective were located at Brooklyn College. FC 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 1980s, the Fiction Collective published steadily (usually around six books a year), supported by 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. During this period, the organization also struggled 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, and founded Fiction Collective Two, or FC2 for short.

The new iteration of the press began once again to receive National Endowment for the Arts funding in the mid-1990s, but in 1996 that funding was challenged by the Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, due to material in FC2 books the Committee deemed offensive. During the subsequent hearings, FC2 received public support from such writers as Mark Strand, William H. Gass, and Toni Morrison. Despite the hearings, FC2 continued to publish throughout the 1990s, including several notable titles (Mark Amerika's The Kafka Chronicles, Cris Mazza's Revelation Countdown, and Samuel R. Delany's Hogg among them) under their Avant-Pop imprint, Black Ice Books.

From 1999 to 2002, FC2 underwent several changes: managing editor Curtis White stepped down; FC2 authors R. M. Berry and Jeffrey DeShell re-organized the press and became acting publishers for a time; and then Lance Olsen became the new Chair of the Board of Directors, and a new Board of Advisors was formed. In 2006, FC2 moved marketing and distribution from Illinois State University to the University of Alabama Press. Layout and design continues to be performed at Publications Center at Illinois State University. In 2007 FC2 moved its business offices from Florida State University to the University of Houston–Victoria. In 2011, FC2 closed its business offices at University of Houston–Victoria, and Olsen oversees operations from the University of Utah.