Tag Archives: Horwitz Publications

Video of launch of Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback

If you missed the recent launch of my monograph Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback, organised by the Australian National University’s Centre for Australian Literary Cultures, the video of the event is now on Youtube for your viewing pleasure. The book, published in hardback by Anthem Publications, is price for higher education institutions at present, but a cheaper paperback version will be available mid-2023.

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September events: Australian pulp fiction and Dangerous Visions & New Worlds

September is shaping up to be a busy month for me, with three events that Pulp Curry readers might be interested in.

September 2nd to 4th is the inaugural Port Fairy Literary Weekend, which is being organised by the Wonderful Blarney Books and Art. The entire program, which looks great, can be viewed on-line here. I will be taking part in a panel titled ‘Dangerous Visions’ on the Saturday afternoon of the festivities. ABC journalist Matt Neal will be interviewing me about the book I co-edited with Iain McIntyre, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985, along with Mykaela Saunders and Jack Latimore, two writers who are part of a new anthology of First Nations science fiction, This All Come Back Now. I have a copy of This All Come Back Now and am looking forward to reading it before the event.

I will also have the remaining stock of my science fiction book, as well as copies of the first two in the series, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture 1950-1980 and Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and popular Fiction 1950-1980, for sale at the festival. Tickets for the event can be purchased via the website here.… Read more

Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback

I know that this site has not been getting quite as much attention from me as usual over the last year. This is largely because I have been so busy with various book projects. A quick update on these might be in order.

First up is my academic monograph, Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback. Out via the Anthem Press Studies in Australian Literature and Culture series in early July, it now has a cover and is available for pre-order. It is in hardcover, with a price that reflects the fact that it is being targeted at institutions and, in particular, libraries, in the first instance, but I have negotiated with Anthem for a much cheaper paperback version of the book will be released by Anthem next year.

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 I am aware of a specific pulp publisher to appear anywhere.… Read more

Rosaleen Norton ‘The Witch of Kings Cross’

Rosaleen Norton aka ‘The Witch of Kings Cross’

I was familiar with the name Rosaleen Norton long before I watched Sonia Bible’s excellent documentary about her, which takes as its title Norton’s long running nickname, The Witch of Kings Cross.

In an attempt to cash in on the upsurge of public interest in the occult that occurred throughout the west in the 1960s, the long defunct Sydney pulp publisher Horwitz Publications put together a number of salacious tabloid style non-fiction books on the so-called rise of witchcraft and Satanism in Australia. My favourite of these, which I wrote about on this site some years ago, the 1965 book Kings Cross Black Magic, was a direct attempt to piggyback on Norton’s fame.

Norton was also a semi-regular presence in the bachelor and barbershop magazines that proliferated on the shelves of Australia’s newsagents in the 1960s, titles like Adam, Man, Pix and Australasian Post. These magazines, incredibly tame by today’s standards, were once seen as very risqué. The activities of Norton slotted in well with their steady diet of stories about UFO sightings, white slavery, heroic Anzacs, shark hunting and out of control teens.

So great was interest in the occult in mid-1960s Australia that the subject even featured in a 1965 episode of the high rating locally produced Crawford TV crime show, Homicide.… Read more

Carter Brown and the Australian craze for faux American crime fiction

Author photo of Alan Yates aka Carter Brown in 1955

In 1950s Australia, one author – writing pulp novels about detectives and cities he’d never visited – gave birth to a phenomenon. I’m over at the CrimeReads writing about Australia’s most successful, least critically recognised, 20th century author, Alan Yates aka Carter Brown, and the popularity of faux American crime fiction in post-war Australia. You can read the entire article at their site here.Read more