FC2

FC2 is hosting two readings at this year’s AWP conference in Boston, and we’ll also be present at the conference book fair with recent/classic FC2 titles in tow.

FC2 On-Site Reading:

An FC2 Fiction Reading: a reading in anticipation of FC2’s forty-year anniversary in 2014. Participants include Kate Bernheimer, Sarah Blackman, Matt Kirkpatrick, Matthew Roberson, Joanna Ruocco, and Melanie Rae Thon, among others. When: Saturday, March 9. 12:00 pm. – 1:15 p.m. Where: Room 207, Level 2. Hynes Convention Center.

FC2 Off-Site Reading:

FC2 Innovative Fiction Prize Reading: FC2 presents winners of the Catherine Doctorow and Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prizes. Participants include Amelia Gray, Patrick Lawler, Joanna Ruocco, and Sarah Blackman. When: Wednesday, March 6. 7:00 p.m. Where: The Field Pub. 20 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA 02139. www.thefieldpub.com.

And here are some select events featuring FC2 authors:

Modern Fairy Tales and Retellings. (Anjali Sachdeva, John Crowley, Kate Bernheimer, Kelly Link, Jane Yolen) When: Thursday, March 7. 9:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. Where: Room 107, Plaza Level.

A Cappella Zoo: A Reading of Magical Realism and Slipstream. (Laura Miller, Amelia Gray, Erin Stalcup, Mary Lou Buschi, Jack Kaulfus) When: Thursday, March 7. 9:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. Where: Room 203, Level 2.

Dancing about Architecture: Writing at the Intersection of Language, Art, and Music. (Michael Mejia, Gretchen Henderson, Katherine Whitcomb, Jeffrey DeShell, Debra di Blasi). When: Thursday, March 7. 10:30 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. Where: Room 201, Level 2.

Samuel R. Delany & Kit Reed: A Reading & Conversation, Sponsored by Wesleyan University Press. (Matthew Cheney, Kit Reed, Samuel R. Delany) When: Thursday, March 7. 3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. Where: Room 210, Level 2.

University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers Reading. (Sabina Murray, Peter Gizzi, Noy Holland, James Tate, Dara Wier) When: Thursday, March 7. 4:30 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. Where: Room 203, Level 2.

12 Good Readers (Jack Christian, Heather Christle, Amelia Gray, Ben Hersey, Dorothea Lasky, Ella Longpre, Scott McClanahan, Ariana Reines, Abraham Smith, Dana Ward, Carolyn Zaikowski) When: Thursday, March 7. 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Where: Cantab Lounge. 738 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

Their Peculiar Ambitions: A Night of Presidential Fiction Readings at AWP! (Amelia Gray, Tara Laskowski, and others) When: Thursday, March 7. 8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Where: The Sweetwater Tavern. 3 Boylston Place, Boston, MA 02116.

Post-Genre Lit: Form in the 21^st Century. (Lacy M. Johnson, Nick Flynn, Lidia Yuknavitch, Kazim Ali, Stephen Elliott) When: Friday, March 8. 9:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. Where: Room 103, Plaza Level.

Origins of Contemporary Fabulist Fiction. (Alta Ifland, Brian Evenson, Josip Novakovich, Peter, Grandbois, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum) When: Friday, March 8. 3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. Where: Room 310, Level 3.

The Literary Legacy of Andre Dubus. (Matthew Batt, Andre Dubus III, Melanie Rae Thon, Nancy Zafris, Bruce Machart) When: Friday, March 8. 4:30 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. Where: Room 102, Plaza Level.

Fairy Tale Review Table. The Yellow Issue, guest edited by Lily Hoang, is hot off the press and will available at the Fairy Tale Review Table (R22) at the AWP Conference Book Fair.

Please mark your calendars for Collective Memory, an event to be held March 15th in honor of the 40th anniversary of the founding the Fiction Collective. Collective Memory will feature readings by founding and early Fiction Collective members: Alain Arias-Misson, Jonathan Baumbach, Steve Katz, Rob Stephenson, and Yuriy Tarnawsky.

Here are three new things, posted in celebration of the start of a new week:

Margo Berdeshevsky has written a beautiful “Letter From Paris,” replete with stunning lyricism and photographs.

In Publisher’s Weekly, Susan Steinberg offers a defense of experimentation in art and literature: “What Happened To Experimental Writing?”

And, at Full Stop, Daniel Green wrote a wonderful review of Noy Holland’s most recent FC2 title, Swim For The Little One First.

Margo Berdeshevsky, author of Beautiful Soon Enough, which was the very first book of fiction to be published through the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, has received a mention worth celebrating at Powells.com. In “My Favorite Poetry Books of the Past Year and a Half” Chris Faatz writes:

One of my all-time favorite poets is Margo Berdeshevsky, a longtime figure on the literary, artistic, and dramatic scenes in the U.S. and abroad (she currently lives in Paris). Her latest book, Between Soul and Stone, is incredible. This may sound trite, but I can’t help but identify Berdeshevsky’s work as being like a gossamer web: intensely beautiful, painstakingly crafted into textually dense strands of poetic light. This is not an easy book to read. It demands, it rewards, every ounce of your reading attention. It is also deeply transformative. If nothing else, you’ll emerge from your reading with a more exalted sense of what beauty means in our lives. That someone can think, and write, like this is a gift to us all.

You can read Faatz’s entire list of favorites here. And don’t forget to check out Berdeshevsky’s Between Soul and Stone (Sheep Meadow Press) and and Beautiful Soon Enough (FC2).

This is the FC2 Newsletter in which we tell you about our website, prizes, current releases, collective members, and more.

WWW.FC2.ORG

Please visit the FC2 website for a complete list of FC2 authors and titles, information regarding the mission and history of the Fiction Collective 2, and submission guidelines for the Sukenick and Doctorow Innovative Fiction prizes. News and author interviews are regularly posted to the FC2 Blog and promoted through Facebook; please “like” our the FC2 Facebook page if you have not done so already. Recent additions to the blog include an in-depth interview with Sara Greenslit, author of As If A Bird Flew By Me (FC2 2011), and a podcast with Jeffrey DeShell, author of Arthouse (FC2 2011). The blog also houses the archive of FC2 podcasts with authors such as Kate Bernheimer, Brian Evenson, Cris Mazza, Steve Tomasula, and Lidia Yuknavitch among others. New to the blog is the most recent installment of Fiction Correctives with Bayard Johnson. Fiction Correctives is a mini-interview series that presents Collective members’ musings on FC2’s mission, cherished backlist titles, and artistic innovation.

CURRENT RELEASES

Swim For The Little One First by Noy Holland
Rescuers Among Skydivers Search Among The Clouds by Patrick Lawler
Fat Girl, Terrestrial by Kellie Wells

The newest installment of Fiction Correctives features Bayard Johnson, author of Damned Right (FC2 1994), which has been translated into German as Speed Taxi (Faber & Faber). Read our interview with Bayard Johnson here.

In an effort to accomodate power loss on the east coast, FC2 is extending the deadline for the annual FC2 Ronald Sukenick/ABR Innovative Fiction Prize and the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize to November 10th. Please submit your book-length manuscripts to FC2’s online submissions manager no later than November 10th.

Congratulations to FC2 author Melanie Rae Thon. Her collection of stories In This Light has just won the Utah Book Award for Fiction. Thon will be reading in honor of the award on October 20th (4:30 p.m.) at the Salt Lake City Public Library, Conference Room B (210 East/400 South , Salt Lake City). Copies of In This Light (Graywolf Press 2011) and The Voice of the River (FC2 2011) will be available for sale at the reading.

Of Thon’s recent FC2 title, Carole Maso has written: “The Voice of the River is a beautifully written, deeply inclusive and profoundly spiritual work of art. I am moved by its great generosity above all, and its wisdom. It is a gift like no other.”

And The New York Times has said of Thon: “The reader is swept along… by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch.”

If you happen to be in the Denver area, don’t miss out on Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. The exhibit will be held at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, 12 October 2012 through 3 February 2013.

Postscript features the work of over fifty artists and writers exploring the artistic possibilities of language. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that raise questions about how we read, look at, hear, and process language today. A major current underlying the exhibition argues that the field of literature known as “conceptual writing” can be seen as engaging in a provocative dialogue with the field of contemporary art, producing new insights into the meaning of both literature and art. Co-curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson, Postscript is the first exhibition to examine the work of conceptual writing, investigating the roots of the movement in the art of the 1960s and 70s and presenting contemporary examples of text-based art practices (from www.mcadenver.org).

One highlight of  the exhibit will surely be Alexandra Grant’s G. babel, a 7×22 foot painting, composed after FC2 author Michael Joyce’s Was. babel has been described as Alexandra Grant’s most ambitious work to date. Inspired by Michael Joyce’s text, babel portrays clusters of encircled words spread out across a nearly 24-foot-long horizontal plane. Photos of babel can be seen on Grant’s webpage here.

And if you haven’t read Was (FC2, 2006) by Michael Joyce then by all means pick up a copy asap! Was is a wonder work, half-poem half-narrative, an often comic nomadic history whose main character is the fleetingness of information itself.

Postscript should be a fantastic exhibition, and it will feature additional FC2 authors as well, such as Mark Amerika, Vanessa Place, and others.

The exhibit is located at MCA Denver: 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, CO 80202. Museum hours are Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 7pm. Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 7pm. More information can be found at MCA Denver’s webpage.

FC2 and the Mütter Museum Present:

READING THE BODY
New American Fiction That Explores the Life of the Human Body by authors from the Fiction Collective 2

October 9, 6:30 pm
Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 19 S. 22nd St.
Philadelphia, PA

ADMISSION FREE

List of Authors:
Samuel Delany is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at Temple University. His most recent fiction includes Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, Dark Reflections, Phallos, and The Mad Man. His critical essays are collected in several volumes available from Wesleyan University Press and other publishers.

Noy Holland’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published work in Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, New York Tyrant, and Post Road, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, and serves on the board of directors at FC2.

Michael Martone’s most recent books are Four for a Quarter, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, and other magazines. He is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama.

Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about experimental writing practices, including, most recently, the novel Calendar of Regrets and the anti-textbook Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. He serves as chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two and fiction editor at Western Humanities Review. He is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Alan Singer is the author of five novels, Alan Singer is the author of five novels, The Ox-Breadth, The Charnel Imp, Memory Wax, Dirtmouth and most recently The Inquisitor’s Tongue. He is currently at work on a new novel, Play, A Novel. He is also writes on aesthetics and critical theory. His most recent critical book is The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art. He is Professor of English at Temple University.