Curtis White co-founded FC2 in 1989 and served as its first Managing Director. His newest book, On Resistance: A Manifesto, available now from Melville House, includes reflections on Fiction Collective and FC2 among other organs of resistance; the following is an excerpt.
[How should] literature respond to a reality that is equal parts vapid and violent, where the celebration of mediocrity is correlated with an utter disregard for human life.
—Jess Bergman, The Nation, January 2026
In 1979, my first book of fiction, Heretical Songs, was accepted by the Fiction Collective, and the trajectory of my life began to take form. Working with the other writers in the Collective began almost immediately; we were a collective, after all, and I was expected to help out. I can’t tell you how right being published by a “collective” felt. It would have suited me fine if they’d called it the Fiction Commune. I thought, “That’s where I belong, among friends, artists, and comrades, and not in the indecipherable world of New York publishing.”
Raymond Federman, Fanny Howe, Ronald Sukenick, and Jon Baumbach had been running the place out of Brooklyn College and overseeing the day-to-day activities of the press. I’m not sure just how front and center the press was for them. For sure, none of them felt born to book publishing, and not unreasonably, because they were writers, good writers, and they would have preferred to be left alone to do their work. Baumbach thought of the situation as an emergency that would end soon. After all, they were mostly New York writers and publishing through the established houses was their birthright. “I couldn’t imagine us going on indefinitely,” Baumbach wrote, “When would we find the time to write our books?”
In short, the thing that got the Collective started was not any zeal for publishing as such but a commitment to American literature’s need for an eclectic and generally outré sense of beauty. Ron, Jon, Fanny, and Ray were perfectly serious about that.
A few years earlier, Fanny and Jon had experienced notable successes with commercial publishers (Fanny with Houghton Mifflin, Jon with Random House), but they saw as early as 1973 what direction publishing would take once corporate conglomeration set in. For instance, Ron’s first two books of fiction were published by the Dial Press, an independent house since 1923, editor-in-chief E. L. Doctorow. It had been owned since 1967 by Dell Publishing, which was purchased by Doubleday in 1976. Doubleday dissolved Dial Press in 1985, but it was revived and became part of Bantam/Doubleday/Dell, then Random House, then Penguin Random House, and finally it went into die Pfoten of the German media giant Bertelsmann — once the central publishing organ of the Nazi Party, employing Jewish slave labor in its printing houses in Lithuania.
Prior to these profit-minded consolidations, Dial was the publisher of controversial works like Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die! But then the “Big Chill” set in. Most notoriously, Jerry Rubin left the Yippees for Wall Street, the very place where he had satirically dropped real dollar bills in 1967. The sixties may have been dead, but the Fiction Collective said, “Long live what is lively!”
Of course, 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.
