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.
Marimo, Mon Amour, by Karen An-hwei Lee, has been selected by K-Ming Chang as winner of the 2025 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish Marimo, Mon Amour in the Fall of 2026.
Upon reflection, we realize most of his accomplishments have been associated with hats. When he lived in a cellar, he existed behind the burrowing beam of a miner’s hat. That was the closest he came to being a poet.
Fiction by Claire Bateman, author of The Pillow Museum.
Ever since the international oligarchy monetized the dream web, advertisements have been streaming continuously through everyone’s brains during sleep, flooding even the inchoate pre-consciousness of the unborn as they tumble in amniotic darkness preparing for a lifetime of retail opportunities.
This isn’t a fairy tale. You are twenty-five years old in the crooked part of Hackney near the park. The month is August, and you have packed up your life in two suitcases, which now stand, zipped and silent, near the door.
K. arrives in the village at night. He crosses a wooden bridge and finds an inn to spend the night. He carries with him a small backpack and a knotty wooden walking stick. His appearance is ragged. This is the opening scene of Franz Kafka’s The Castle.
FC2’s annual manuscript contests are open to submissions until November 1. Send us your manuscripts!
Lining right up in a loosely contemporary tradition, or swoon of self-revelation, I recently self-discovered that I write fiction and poetry so I don’t have to write about them. So I can slip out of one thing and bleed all over other things. So I don’t have to double-check with reality, logic, laundry, so meaning can mean open and opening forever, a circular fan, unfixed, in flux, fragmented.
FC2 is pleased to announce that K-Ming Chang will serve as judge for the 2025 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, and that Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle will serve as judges for the 2025 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest.
Warm congratulations to Lynn C. Pitts, who has been nominated for a 2023 Shirley Jackson award for her story “The Swan,” from FC2’s Infinite Constellations anthology, edited by Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura.
