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Mission Statement

Fiction Collective Two is among the few alternative presses in America devoted to publishing fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu.

FC2 was originally founded in 1974 as the Fiction Collective, a group of avant-garde writers, among whom were Jonathan Baumbach, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Ronald Sukenick. In his New York Times Book Review column "Guest Word," of September 15, 1974, Sukenick described the group's aim to "make serious novels and story collections available" and "keep them in print permanently." The Collective's subsequent history has been shaped by this commitment to preserve cultural resources that might otherwise be silenced or lost.

FC2's mission has been and remains to publish books of high quality and exceptional ambition whose styles, subject matter, or forms push the limits of American publishing and reshape our literary culture.

FC2 books have received disproportionate attention in critical works on American fiction of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. More than ten percent of the authors selected for inclusion under the category "American Prose since 1945" in The Norton Anthology of American Literature (fifth edition) have been affiliated with the Fiction Collective, and several received their first publication with the press. Fiction Collective authors have also been conspicuously represented in the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction, as well as in numerous other anthologies.

FC2 authors have been the subject of critical studies published in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Chicago Review. Articles about the press have appeared in Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Publishers Weekly. Books published by the press have won or been nominated for the American Book Award, the Western States Book Award, the PEN West Award, and the BEA Firecracker Award.

FC2 continues the commitment of its founders to unsettle the bounds of literature and broaden the audience for America's most adventurous writing.