FC2

Susan Fox has written a beautiful review of Margo Berdeshevsky’s collection Beautiful Soon Enough (FC2) in the newest issue (issue 18/19) of Poetry International.

Fox writes:

The style here is richly but delicately lyric, a web of resonating filaments. The risk of such writing is tenuousness, a failure to grasp the reader’s mind tightly enough to make a deep impression. But Berdeshevsky’s muscularity of observation and precision of detail override the risk. One brief example of that precision: two women in “Le Serveur” stroll “with a turquoise shared umbrella” – why those adjectives in that order? Wouldn’t we usually say “a shared turquoise umbrella”? But no, this isn’t a colorful umbrella, it’s a shared umbrella, made real by its color. The order is accurate.

And:

For some readers such perspective might seem a liability, as if only male writers are allowed a gender-oriented sensibility, as if a profound exploration of feminine experience belongs to a lesser literature. I remember a friend’s poetry workshop experience some years back in which the much-laurelled male poet running the show derided her poem about her mother’s death as too limited in subject matter, while extolling a male student’s verse about the shock of his first awareness of his father’s penis as “universal.” It’s time we got this straight. Women who write about women are no more parochial than men who write about men. Moby-Dick is about all of us; so is powerful work in which the perspective and characters are female. Some important knowledge is – or ought to be – just plain unisex. Berdeshevsky offers such important knowledge to anyone who will take it.

You can purchase the issue here and you can explore Berdeshevsky’s work further at her website.

Luke Goebel is the 2012 winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Prize. His collection FOURTEEN STORIES: None of Them are Yours will be published by FC2 in 2014. Goebel recently interviewed Susan Steinberg (The End Of Free Love, FC2) (Hydroplane, FC2) about her new collection of Stories, Spectacle, (Graywolf Press). You can read the interview at HTMLGIANT.

Of her characters, Steinberg says:

I guess they risk being ridiculed, objectified, humiliated, unprotected, seen as “confessional,” seen as too girly, seen as stupid, seen as too provocative, seen as unimaginative. Same things the female author risks.

I didn’t answer the second part, I just realized. What is risky for a woman to say?

I don’t think it’s as much about subject matter, as it is about style. I think it’s risky to be direct.

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).

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 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.

There’s a new Fiction Correctives interview with FC2’s Chair of the Board of Directors, Lance Olsen. Olsen talks about writing heterodox fiction in 2012; his recent FC2 title, Calendar of Regrets; and several favorite backlist titles. Read the interview here.

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.