Aussie Pulp Claims the Limelight

Andrew Nette, my editor from Sticking It to the Man (2019), recently let it be known that he has a new book coming out in July, and its subject matter—Australia’s Horwitz Publications—is right up my alley. As he explains in his blog, Pulp Curry,

Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback originated in a PhD I took at Sydney’s Macquarie University, and turning it into a monograph has taken a considerable amount of my time over the last year. Regular readers will no doubt be familiar with Horwitz, as the publisher of many of the paperback covers that I post on this site. My study is the first book-length examination of Australian pulp and one of the few detailed studies ... of a specific pulp publisher to appear anywhere.

It not only looks [at] the genres Horwitz published, but the writers and artists who worked for it, including some groundbreaking research on Australian female pulp writers. It also reveals the hidden role that Horwitz, derided purely as a low-rent purveyor of cheap, salacious fiction for most of its existence, had in the take up of the paperback by mainstream Australian publishers, as well as how Horwitz pulp was a key vehicle for powerful vernacular modernist currents that coursed through Australia in the 1950s & 1960s.

You can order a hardcover copy of this Anthem Press publication here. Its retail price is a bit steep—$125 AUD, or about $90 USD—but Nette says, “I have negotiated with Anthem for a much cheaper paperback version of the book will be released by Anthem next year.”