Among the titles just announced for publication in Autumn 2022, we are extremely excited to bring you a new Urbanomic imprint, K-Pulp Switch. Each K-Pulp Switch brings together singular texts by two different authors in tête-bêche format (previously used for Urbanomic/Sequence’s bilingual edition of Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography).

The series takes inspiration from the Ace Doubles of the 50s and 60s, a popular series that played an important part in the early careers of by many greats including Isaac Asimov, Murray Leinster, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, William Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick.

Switch updates the classic format for original texts that experiment with theory, fiction, hyperfiction, philosophy and poetics in forward-looking ways.

As well as its inherent practicality and the benefit of discovering two stories and authors in one, the standard Doubles format served the purpose of streamlining the pulp factory: author and publisher alike knew the score, every manuscript had to be more or less the same length, and established names could be paired with less well-known writers so as to bring new talent into the spotlight.

For us too, it’s a model that fits the K-Pulp culture, but also helps manage and expand our output, meaning that we can be open to proposals for future Switches. Texts must be around 20,000 words, have a short title with no subtitle, no or minimal footnotes, and should challenge the boundaries of established styles and disciplines.

With each Switch there will be some relation, albeit oblique and asymmetrical, between the two sides, and the connections and/or friction between the two titles plays a part in defining the unique consistency of each pairing.

The three initial Switches we’re announcing today are:

Alberto Rangel, Verdant Inferno / Jean-Christophe Goddard, A Scabby Black Brazilian

As any follower of Urbanomic knows, we are obsessive junglists, and these two incredible texts, one historical work from Brazil and one contemporary decolonial theory-fiction, explore the awe and delirium of the encounter with the Amazon rainforest. More details here.

David Farrell Krell, Star Milk / Elaine Tam, The Pool

One for the Spinal Catastrophism fans, this pair of bizarre disquisitions on body, memory, and regression features lactic genealogy and neothalassic romance. More details here.

Angus Carlyle, Phantom Lure / Sam Forsythe, Every Day Catastrophes

Decoys and toolkits, secrecy and fear: two explorations of how sonic camouflage has been used in war and peacetime, and what our tools tell us about our internal landscape of anxiety. More details here.

It’s incredibly exciting to be stepping once more into unknown publishing territory with this new series and we hope you’ll be just as excited to join us and discover these double doses of Urbanomic.

As described by Robin Mackay in his conversation with Simon Sellars, the first author to publish on K-Pulp, the sub-label was conceived as a venue

to publish works in which fiction and theory intermix in different ways, or require each other for different reasons. […] Importantly, it’s also a matter of paying non-ironic homage to, and continuing, the aesthetic and conceptual legacy of pulp media as opposed to fine/high art and the high traditions of modernism.

Of course, here I’m thinking of Mark Fisher’s ‘pulp modernism’. Many of Mark’s examples here are of the role that thrifty distributive media can play in spreading radical concepts and attitudes. This is something that’s always been important to me with Urbanomic, that it is about mass production and distribution of paperback books, not making precious untouchable coffee-table art objects […].

[…] [I]t is also a way of standing one’s ground and expressing love for a certain seam of culture which, if it is acknowledged at all, is usually fated, between academia and art, to be either objectified and dissected or ironically appropriated. […] Another way of looking at K-Pulp is that it is about creating cultural objects that are conceptually charged, without being immaculate and untouchable in the way art objects are—they are also hooked into circuits of imagination, commerce, hyperstition, and consummated pleasure.

With K-Pulp Switch, Urbanomic reaffirms this commitment and sets the pulp factory in motion!

K-Pulp Switch: Have it both ways: singular texts by two different authors in a classic pulp format