Forms at War: FC2 1999-2009

by R.M. Berry (Editor), Steve Tomasula (Contributor), Leslie Scalapino (Contributor)

Forms at FC2 1999-2009 collects twenty-three experimental prose works published by Fiction Collective Two during the last decade. Together they contest the false present of the Bush years, continuing the political and aesthetic struggle that gave birth to modernism’s dream of form. These fictions—by Kim Addonizio, Diane Williams, Michael Martone, Brian Evenson, and nineteen others, first published by FC2 between 1999 and 2009—all locate America, not in the neverland of free-trade or the lost Eden of cultural homogeneity, but through the truer landscape of language. Kate Bernheimer’s portents, Lidia Yuknavitch’s embodied medium, Steve Tomasula’s engagement of the letter, all refuse the nowhere of Bush-speak; each insists on itself here and now. In these works the vendettas of post–9/11 confront a limit. Their counter-history, not of narratives, but of forms, brings to the surface what our ceaseless violence has repressed, an alienation so widespread it feels like second-nature. Forms at War brings back what never went away. Its writing is the work we are.

Genres: Short Stories

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2009

About the author

Ralph M. Berry, Professor, Ph.D., MFA Iowa (1985), specializes in twentieth century literature, critical theory, and creative writing (fiction). In 1985, he served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tours in France. R. M. Berry is the author of the novels Frank (2005), "an unwriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," and Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times "notable book" of 1998. His first collection of short fictions, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and his second, Dictionary of Modern Anguish (2000), was described by the Buffalo News as "a collection of widely disparate narratives inspired...by the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein." Berry's essays on experimental fiction and philosophy have appeared in Symploke, Narrative, Philosophy and Literature, Soundings, American Book Review, Context, and numerous critical anthologies. With Jeffrey Di Leo he has edited the essay collection, Fiction's Present: Situating Narrative Innovation, (SUNY Press: 2007). From 1999 through 2007 he was publisher of Fiction Collective Two. He is currently chair of the English Department of Florida