In these early days of the AI reordering of all things human, this battle within the larger culture wars has been made to seem insignificant. Whether realist or anti-realist, we are up against the same problem: the end of reading, the end of the book, and certainly the end of anything as quaint as “aesthetics.” AI gives not a fuck about beauty.
We are excited to announce that the 2027 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize will be judged by Khadijah Queen, and the 2027 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize will be judged by Vanessa Saunders.
Curse Him, by Sophia Terazawa, has been selected by Kazim Ali as winner of the 2026 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish Curse Him in the Fall of 2027.
The Chimeras, by Joe Fletcher, has been selected by final judge Alvin Lu as winner of the 2026 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish The Chimeras in the Fall of 2027.
While Afterlife is in no way a memoir, it’s threaded through with family history, mostly about my next oldest sister, who in real life died in 2020. She didn’t die of Covid, but of some mysterious other illness during the gloomiest, harshest period of the first big surge of the pandemic. Because of the circumstances, I didn’t visit her when she was in the hospital, and our family didn’t hold a memorial for her for another two years. During this weirdly empty time, when I knew she was dead but still hadn’t marked her passing in a way that felt real, I began to approach incidents I would not have put on paper while there was any chance she could have read them.
Translator’s Note: What follows is a translation from the Chinese of an excerpt from the novel The Lost Lives of Lena Wu (Wúlìnà shīqù de rénshēng) by Yvonne Fung. I came across it in the form of loose pages lying unassociated among my father’s papers.
The 2026 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize will be judged by Kazim Ali, and the 2026 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize will be judged by Alvin Lu.
In previous years, the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Contest has been open to writers “with at least three books of fiction published.” This year, we will be excising the words “of fiction” from the eligibility guidelines.
We are delighted to announce that a generous donation from Julia Frey, widow of FC2 co-founder Ronald Sukenick, has enabled us to increase the cash prize associated with the annual Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest from $1,500 to $3,000.
Weirdly Tuned Antennae, by Radhika Singh, has been selected by final judges Katie Jean Shinkle and Steven Dunn as winner of the 2025 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish Weirdly Tuned Antennae in the Fall of 2026.
