Crack-Up

The torment of a woman, frustrated in marriage, torn between compassion and desire. A banned lesbian pulp classic, back-in-print for the first time in sixty years.Karen is a woman trapped in a marriage to an impotent man…who finds the passion she craves with other men…and in the willing arms of Jean, a married woman who can never be satisfied by any man. It is the story of Karen’s emotional and physical torment as she seeks what her body craves… and the love her soul needs.

March Hastings, at least initially, was one of the pseudonyms (along with Laura Duchamp, Viveca Ives, and Alden Stowe) of Sally M. Singer, a lesbian writer born in 1930s and reputedly the author of more than 130 novels, across many genres, in her lifetime. She is undoubtedly best-known for her string of ground-breaking, lesbian-themed, sexy pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and early 1960s, including Three Women, The Third Theme, Veil of Torment, and The Demands of the Flesh. She wrote many other sexy novels as Hastings, not all of them with a lesbian theme. However, by the late-60s/early 70s, the March Hastings pseudonym was co-opted by her publisher and became a house name for many different authors penning lurid paperbacks (one of them being prolific pulp author Len Levinson, whose first novel Private Sessions was released under her name), diluting and confusing her early legacy as an influential author of lesbian pulp and straight erotic fiction.