FC2

FC2 author Margo Berdeshevsky has a new poem up at the Black Earth Institute. Berdeshevsky is the author of Beautiful Soon Enough (FC2).

FC2 is pleased to announce that the reading periods for the annual Sukenick and Doctorow book prizes will begin August 15, 2012 and extend through November 1, 2012.

The FC2 Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize was started in 2006 as a way to find emerging authors whose aesthetic visions harmonize with the innovative aesthetic vision of FC2. The prize is open to any U.S. writer in English who has not previously published with FC2. The winner receives publication and $1,000. The 2011 winner of the Sukenick Prize is Sarah Blackman’s Motherbox. Novelist and FC2 Board Member Jeffrey DeShell will serve as judge for the upcoming 2012 contest.

The FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize was started in 2008 to bring established innovative writers to FC2. The prize is open to any U.S. writer in English with at least three books of fiction published. The winner receives publication and $15,000. The 2011 winner of the Doctorow Prize is Mac Wellman’s Linda Perdido. Writer and artist Rikki Ducornet will serve as judge for the upcoming 2012 contest.

Submissions to both the Sukenick and Doctorow prizes can be made to FC2’s electronic submissions manager starting August 15, 2012. For additional information and submission instructions, please go to http://www.fc2.org/prizes.html.

FC2 Newsletter, Summer 2012

in which we tell you all sorts of things about our website, prizes, current releases, collective members, and more.

Website

Please visit the newly redesigned FC2 website for more news and information about FC2 books, FC2 authors, and the fabulous FC2 backlist.

The FC2 blog now features an ongoing series of interviews with FC2 authors called Fiction Correctives in which questions about innovative fiction, FC2’s history and backlist, and current writing are posed to FC2 authors from over the decades. The series is conducted by our extraordinary intern, Rachel Levy, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.  An excerpt from Michael Martone’s interview:  “I think of myself as a formalist I think of myself as a formalist . . . for me all fiction is experimental.”

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Prizes

2011 book prize winners have been announced:

The Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
Mac Wellman for Linda Perdido
Judged by Percival Everett

Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize
Sarah Blackman for Mother Box
Judged by Noy Holland

We are delighted to announce that in 2012, final judges are Rikki Ducornet  (for the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize) and Jeffrey DeShell (for the Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize).

2012 contest guidelines are available here and manuscripts will be accepted beginning soon, on August 15, 2012. Please spread the word!

FC2 proudly abides by the CLMP Contest Ethics Code, which is reprinted on our website.

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Current Releases

The Inquisitor’s Tongue by Alan Singer

Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith—A Diptych by Joanna Ruocco

Light Without Heat by Matthew Kirkpatrick  http://www.mattkirkpatrick.com/w/

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Collective Member News

Next week, Mark Amerika will give the opening keynote address at Mix: Merging into Media conference in Bath-Spa, England.  This summer he’s reading  Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents(Les Figues, 2012); Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2010)
Tan Lin;  Malarkey (Biblioasis, 2012) by Anakana Schofield; and The Chronology of Water: A Memoir (Hawthorne Books, 2011) by Lidia Yuknavitch.  His most recent book is Creative Evolution — and
a multimedia essay for upcoming premiere issue of “Ctrl-Z: Journal of New Media Philosophy” appears here. You can also visit The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), the latest work in Mark Amerika’s collaborative series of transmedia narratives.

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“Seesongs, a workbook” by Rosaire Appel is now available at Amazon and Printed Matter in NYC:  “The eyes look, and the eyes read. I suggest they can also listen - an act different from both looking and reading. To explore this possibility, I have gathered together these pages of non-linguistic, non-pictorial drawings.”

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Mark Axelrod has appearances this summer at a screenwriting workshop in Santiago Chile, and at US Embassy Lectures, Buenos Aires, Argentina. His 2012 honors include—among others—the Chapman University Wang-Fradkin Senior Professorship in Creative writing. Outreach projects include a collaboration between the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing and Orange High School, Orange, CA for the Young Writers Project.  He is under contract with Continuum for a book on dialogue in screenwriting and, among other works-in-progress, has a new screenplay, Stayin’ Alive (for Cuckoo Clock Productions, Hamburg, Germany).  His summer reading recommendations include Blindly by Claudio Magris and Necropolis by Boris Pahor.

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Margo Berdeshevsky reports that she was in Paris at the & Now festival “with all the FC2 beauties,” reading from Beautiful Soon Enough. Her  newest poetry book, “Between Soul & Stone”  is out from Sheep Meadow Press. See this new review for it:  http://tinyurl.com/67sk4e8

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Kate Bernheimer will join the MFA faculty in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in August. Her new children’s book, The Lonely Book (illustrated by Chris Sheban) was recently released; you may be surprised to learn this, but it is about a lonely book. The series she co-curated along with her brother, Andrew Bernheimer (“The House on Chicken Feet: Fairy-Tale Architecture”),   recently won an AIANY Award of Merit.  She and Andrew are at work curating more fairy-tale architecture for Places/Design Observer to appear in 2012. Another collaboration with her brother appears in a special supplement of Ninth Letter edited by Scott Geiger. She is currently collaborating with painter Noah Saterstrom on a project called “Wastrels” (for animation and print).

Kate’s summer recommendations: The Annotated Peter Pan (edited by Maria Tatar); Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney; Achewood; Aamer Hussein

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Brian Conn has a story, “Counting Sheep,” in the current Conjunctions, and another, “The Elephant Token,” forthcoming in Unstuck. He has also been busy organizing an editorial experiment for the journal
Birkensnake– FC2ers who are interested in curating a literary journal
with a stranger, please consider participating in this experiment!
Details at http://birkensnake.com/editbirkensnake6.php.

His summer reading: M. John Harrison, Jack Vance, Napoleon.

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Lucy Corin won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters which will allow her to live and write in Rome for a year. A new short story collection, Over a Hundred Apocalypses, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s Books.

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Amelia Gray recently went to China from June 27 - July 8 in an exchange with the amazing International Writing Program.

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Noy Holland is featured in an interview in Architectures of Possibility, ed by Lance Olsen.  New short fiction, “Chupeta,” currently appears in Web Conjunctions. She attended the &Now Conference and read at Sorbonne University. At the Juniper Institute in June, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Noy was featured as a reader with Rikki Ducornet and also offered a craft lecture called “Usage Is More Powerful than Reason.”

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Required (Not Recommended) Reading, Noy Holland’s “Chupeta”

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Big news about stories from Michael Martone and Blue Guide to Indiana adapted to the stage, to be performed in his hometown.

http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120525/LIVING/305259996/1009

Two early titles. Alive and Dead in Indiana and Safety Patrol appear as part of the rEprint e-book series published by Dzanc.

He now hosts, and writes for, a television series called “Alabama Art Seen,” produced by the University of Alabama, and  is part of a new group called The Four Horseman of the Short Story Apocolypse. So far, they have performed at the University of Iowa and for Sarabande Books in Louisville.

Martone says “Check out Lewis Hyde’s As Common as Air and a new press called Origami Zoo.”

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Michael Mejia has just moved to Salt Lake City, where he will be starting a new position in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, teaching alongside fellow FC2 authors Lance Olsen and Melanie Rae Thon. He has new work, a speculative-nonfiction-appropriated-comic, forthcoming in the summer issue of Western Humanities Review. The press he co-founded (with Mindy Wilson and Sandra Meek), Ninebark Press, released its third title in the spring, Armor Amour, a book of poems by Amy Pence. The text includes graphic scores of five poems set as a song cycle for soprano and piano by composer Hunter Ewen, and an audio download of a performance of the cycle, as well as a reading of the book by Amy Pence and additional voices. Ninebark is particularly interested in work with an international angle and manuscripts that expand the possibilities of the book in unique ways. You can learn more at: http://www.ninebarkpress.org/index.html. Submissions for prose are open!

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FC2 also welcomes Michael Mejia as the newest member of the FC2 Board of Directors.

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Lance Olsen received a fellowship in April from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  He attended &Now in Paris, participating in several events: a Ben Marcus panel; a panel called The Collaborative Moment(s); and the FC2 Flash Reading with Jeffrey Deshell, Brian Evenson, Noy Holland, Elisabeth Sheffield, Susan Steinberg, Steve Tomasula, and Yuriy Tarnawsky. He interviewed Nick Kimbro on HTMLGIant about Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing.

And a lovely note from Lance on a title from FC2’s not-too-far-back backlist, his suggested summer reading for you:

“In preparation for teaching it this fall, I just finished rereading my awesome new colleague at the University of Utah Michael Mejia’s collage dissonance, Forgetfulness, which answers the question: what would an extended narrative composed by Anton von Webern look like?  Brilliant, sharp-edged, coruscant.  You can’t go wrong there.”

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Doug Rice’s newest hybrid book of photography, philosophy and poetics, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist has been published by Copilot Press. Doug has also been awarded a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany for 2012 and 2013.

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Elisabeth Sheffield offers two summer reading recommendations: “The Beginners,” by Rebecca Wolff and “The Marbled Swarm,” by Dennis Cooper.

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Susan Steinberg’s collection of short stories, Spectacle, is coming out in January with Graywolf Press.

(View the spectacular cover here.)

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Yuriy Tarnawsky participated in the FC2 flash reading at the Paris &Now Conference this June and appeared on a panel. Among many other projects: Flowers for the Patient, selected essays and interviews, ed. by Vasyl Gabor, is forthcoming from Piramida Publishing, Lviv, Ukraine; and an Italian monograph on his work by Maria-Grazia Bartolini, based on her PhD Dissertation Jurij Tarnavs’kyj: una figura dell’emigrazione             ucraina negli Stati Uniti. Analisi della produzione poetica dal 1956 al 1970 (Milan University) is also forthcoming.

“The fourth Хорошо: Interview with Yuriy Tarnawsky,” by T. M. De Vos, appears in April’s Gloom Cupboard.

Forthcoming reading dates this summer include July 22(Poems from Modus Tollens, Madhatters’ Review Reading, New York Poetry Festival, Governor’s Island, NY) and July 28(“One Tongue Reading,” featuring excerpts from Short Tails and a showing of “Why is Water so Beautiful,” a video by AD Jameson, based on Yuriy Tarnawsky’s texts, Music and Arts Center of Greene County, Hunter, NY).

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Melanie Rae Thon has received two awards this year: The Gina Berriault Award, San Francisco State University and a Faculty Fellow Award, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

She reports of a very mysterious reading to take place on July 18 at The Alta Club in Salt Lake City, a private club, members only, to which she hopes to acquire the code for entry and the time of her appearance.  We look forward to a full report!

Her summer reading suggestions include: Lidia Yuknavitch’s  The Chronology of Water;  Brian Richardson’s  Unnatural Voices;  The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel;  Animal Eye by Paisley Rekdal;  and  The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger.

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Lidia Yuknavich hasan essay in a recent issue of The Sun called “the unspeakable things between our bellies,” and has an interview coming out with Mother Jones this month.  Her debut novel, Dora: A Head Case is forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in September.  She also won the Oregon Book Awards Reader’s Choice Award and a PNBA for The Chronology of Water.

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And as a final note, FC2 has recently been featured in a Vice Magazine piece by Blake Butler:  “FC2’s 40 Years of Brainbending.”
http://www.vice.com/read/fc2s-40-years-of-brainbending

Here’s to 40 more years of brainbending, and to a great summer.

There’s a new review of Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough at Poetry International. The review deftly discusses the rich language of Beautiful Soon Enough within the context of Berdeshevsky’s poetry:

Readers were introduced to Margo Berdeshevsky’s rich use of language with her collection of poetry, But a Passage in Wilderness, in 2007.  Her recent foray into fiction with the publication of Beautiful Soon Enough demonstrates that she has not abandoned poetry. In this winner of FC2’s American Book Review /Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, published by The University of Alabama Press, we continue to encounter lyricism, fresh imagery and classical allusions, a language that reflects a poet’s sensibility. Comprised of twenty-three stories, ranging in length from one to eight pages, these are artfully sculpted fictions conveyed with astonishing phrasing, yet transmitted with relative ease.

Read the rest of the review here at Poetry International.

Blake Butler has profiled FC2 for VICE magazine. In this profile, Butler gives a brief history of the press and discuss some of his favorite FC2 titles. Read the article here.

Check out this recent post on League of Extraordinary Authors by FC2’s Margo Berdeshevsky, author of Beautiful Soon Enough. She talks about “the other woman’s shoes as objet d’art.”

FC2 is very pleased to launch the new Fiction Collective 2 website. The web-address remains www.fc2.org, but the site has been completely redesigned and beautified. Explore the new site here!

FC2 author Sara Greenslit will participate in a reading/panel next week, June 15th at 1:00pm, at the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books. For further details, please visit the festival’s website.

The newest installment if Fiction Correctives features Rob Stephenson, author of Passes Through. In this interview, Stephenson talks about the creative process as deep engagement in an activity that pushes toward the unfamiliar. He also describes his process for composing Passes Through, which involved a specially designed three-pronged system for culling and mixing material from more than a decade of his own journaling. And he pays tribute to the wonderful Marianne Hauser. Read the interview here.

Check out the new review of Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter. Reviewer Kathryn Houghton writes, “What makes Martone’s writing truly remarkable, however, is his use of and attention to language, especially when it becomes complex and seems on the verge of spinning out of control.”