We at Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review are proud to announce that Frederic Tuten, icon of American literature and well-known art critic, will be the Judge of the 2012 Michael Rubin Book Award in Fiction.

Born in 1936 in the Bronx, Mr. Tuten had a rough and tumble childhood, and by the age of 16 he had dropped out of High School to pursue a life as a painter in Paris. Returning to America, he received his undergraduate degree from City College of New York, studied art history at National Autonomous University of Mexico, got his Ph.D. in 19th century American literature from New York University, and spent 15 years as the head of the Graduate Program for Creative Writing at City College of New York.

The author of five books of fiction, numerous short stories, and many essays on art, writing, and film, his novels include The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (Citidal Press, 1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (Black Classic Press, 1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (Black Classic Press, 1993), Van Gogh’s Bad Cafe (Black Classic Press, 1997), and The Green Hour (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002). His short fiction has appeared in Conjuctions, Fence, Fiction, Granta, The New Review of Literature, and Tri-Quarterly. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1973, and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. His most recent work is a collection of interrelated short stories called Self Portraits: Fictions (2010).

Mr. Tuten seems torn between art and literature, saying, “What is more beautiful, words or images? I don’t have an answer”. In an interview with the website Book Forum, he goes on to say, “Roy [Roy Lichtenstein cover artist of several of Mr. Tuten’s novels] once said to me, when an artist goes to make a painting, he or she already has in mind what a work of art should look like. And that, he said was the problem. It is the same problem for writers when they start a novel or a story. Hence, we produce the same novels and stories. Roy was a seeker, an original, and his work inspired me to approach my writing with questions.”

Here is a program of Frederic Tuten reading from Self Portraits: Fictions at The New York Public Library, followed by an interview.