The San Diego State University Collection; Harold Jaffe, Editor-in-Chief.
The St. Lawrence University Collection; Joe David Bellamy, Editor-in-Chief.
The writer and editor Joe David Bellamy founded and edited Fiction International in New York from 1973 to 1982, and during that period established Fiction International as one of the outstanding innovative writing literary journals in the US.
Bellamy published writers such as Gary Snyder, Walter Abish, Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Asa Baber, and Harold Jaffe. Respecting Jaffe as a writer and editor and realizing that Jaffe had just been hired at SDSU, Bellamy offered the journal to Jaffe and SDSU for $13,000. Jaffe approached Dean Detweiller who offered to split the sum with Jaffe. Thus the journal came to SDSU which published its first issue in 1983 on Literature and Politics.
Jaffe enlisted his colleague Larry McCaffery to co-edit the journal and McCaffery remained as co-editor from 1984 until 1992. Since then Jaffe has edited Fiction International singly. In the ensuing years Jaffe changed the concentration of FI into a literary-cultural journal with a double emphasis on Innovation and Social Activism. Published writers include many of the outstanding figures of tour time: Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Clarice Lispector, John Edgard Wideman, Lawrence Feringhetti, William Burroughs, John A Williams, Luisa Valenzuela, Georges Perec, and numerous significant writers abroad.
Special issues have included American Indian Writing, Third World Women’s Writing, Japanese Fiction, Central American Writing, etc. Other thematic issues are cited above.