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 "Guest Word" of Sept 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 style, subject matter, or form 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 Norton's anthology Postmodern Literature, 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 Chicago Review. Articles about the press have appeared in Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Publisher's Weekly. Books published by the press have won or been nominated for the American Book Award, Western States Book Award, PEN West award, and 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.