BOOK LAUNCH: WE ARE STILL HERE: STUDENT VOICES FROM GAZA
2025-11-03 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/London)
Housmans are honored to be hosting the launch event for this courageous book.

We Are Still Here is an anthology of raw, unfiltered, and courageous voices featuring short and long stories, poems, essays, and testimonies written by students from Gaza’s universities, edited by Prof. Zahid Pranjol and Dr. Jacob Norris published by Daraja Press. Throughout the evening we host readings from Gazan students, both via video recording and live in the shop, followed by an open discussion with the book’s editor Zahid Pranjol.

Alongside the book, we will be selling Palestinian food, tote bags and stickers that support local Palestinian businesses in London.

This is a free event. Please RSVP below.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature with Alyssa Battistoni (in conversation with Helen Hester)
2025-11-06 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans are very excited to welcome Dr Alyssa Battistoni to the shop to discuss her vital work of political theory, Free Gifts: Capitalism and The Politics of Nature. Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.

Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

We are delighted to also welcome to Housmans Professor Helen Hester, author of, among other brilliant titles, shop favourite, Xenofeminism, to interview Alyssa.

OUR SPEAKERS

Alyssa Battistoni is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Boston Review, n+1, Dissent, The New Statesman, Jacobin, and New Left Review.

Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and theories of work, and she’s a member of the international working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and Post-Work (Bloomsbury).

The two will talk for around 45 minutes-1hr followed by an open discussion and book signing.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please choose the ‘unwaged’ option.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: Bourgeois Coldness: Henrike Kohpeiß in conversation with Lilly Markaki
2025-11-08 19:00 - 20:30
Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.

Andreas Malm

We are delighted to welcome an incredibly exciting scholar, Henrike Kohpeiß, to the shop to launch the new English translation of her book Bourgeois Coldness.

‘Bourgeois coldness’ refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

Henrike will be in conversation with Dr Lilly Markaki from Royal Holloway, University of London. They’ll discuss the text and it’s key conceits for around 45 minutes-1hr, followed by an open discussion. We look forward to seeing you there!

Our Speakers:

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher in Berlin, working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, Black studies and feminist philosophy. She regularly publishes work in academic journals and criticism in magazines. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series ‘Feelings at the end of the world’ at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, and was published in German in 2023 by Campus Verlag.

Lilly Markaki is Lecturer in Race and Culture in Film and Media at Royal Holloway, University of London. Bridging critical theory, visual culture studies, media theory, and Black radical and anti-colonial thought, their work investigates the relationship between aesthetics and politics, exploring how insurgent practices—whether philosophical, poetic, or visual—can generate forms of solidarity that unsettle colonial-modern ontologies and anthropocentric logics.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please choose the ‘unwaged’ option.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: FERAL CLASS with Marc Garrett
2025-11-19 19:00 - 20:30
Untamed, Unheard, Unstoppable… a moving memoir about being a working-class artist… Art on the Margins, Life Without Permission

Feral Class is Marc Garrett’s deeply personal and thought-provoking exploration of his early years, chronicling his journey as a working-class artist navigating a world that often rejects them. Through humorous, vivid storytelling and incisive critique, Garrett explores how his upbringing shaped his identity, forging a path that defied societal expectations. How can one survive, let alone thrive, as part of what Garrett describes as the feral class: a group of individuals who, like him, exist outside traditional institutions and thrive in the margins, using resourcefulness and rebellion to carve out their own artistic spaces?

Weaving together personal memories, political reflections, and the struggles of working-class artists, Feral Class challenges the elitism of the art world. It celebrates the radical potential of those who refuse to conform. Garrett’s narrative is both an intimate self-portrait and a rallying cry for artists who refuse to be tamed. Passionate, unfiltered, and insightful, this book is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of class, creativity, and resistance.

Bio: Marc Garrett’s life and work embody the intersection of art, technology, and social change, shaped by his working-class upbringing and a commitment to challenging institutional hierarchies. Growing up in Southend-On-Sea, he explored creative expression through street art, pirate radio, and early online activism before co-founding Furtherfield in 1996 with Ruth Catlow, an artist-led community resisting the commercialisation of the art world. Despite personal challenges, including a cancer diagnosis in 2022, Garrett continues to focus on ideas and questions that acknowledge and engage working-class and feral-class contexts as a springboard for more extensive dialogues on creating conditions for social change across art, technology, and ecology.

Marc will be joined in conversation with the imitable Cassie Thornton. Cassie is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please choose the ‘unwaged’ option.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

SOLD OUT! The First Jasmines by Saima Begum
2025-11-24 19:00 - 20:30
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE ADDED TO A WAITING LIST PLEASE EMAIL SHOP@HOUSMANS.COM

Housmans and Hajar Press are delighted to celebrate the launch of this important, magnificent novel. Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines follows two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, after they are captured by the military while on the way to visit their mother in what was then called East Pakistan, in 1971.

Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.

As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.

We are extremely lucky to have Saima Begum with us on the night, joined in conversation by Shahnaz Ahsan. We anticipate this will be a popular event so please book ahead to avoid dissapointment.

OUR SPEAKERS:

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

Shahnaz Ahsan is an author, columnist and award-winning food writer. ​Her latest book is The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memories and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen, published by HarperNorth. Her debut novel Hashim & Family was an Observer Best Book of 2020 and was shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize. ​

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: JAW FILLER: Maz Murray & Charlie Markbreiter in conversation with So Mayer
2025-12-15 19:00 - 20:30
Experimental trans neonoir fiction.

‘Jaw Filler instantly joins the canon of outlier literature: jaw-dropper, more like.’

– Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold

Housmans and Montez Press invites you to a conversation around the new neonoir novel Jaw Filler by Maz Murray & Charlie Markbreiter, hosted by writer So Mayer. Tickets are free but booking is essential.

‘You don’t need dysphoria to be trans. You don’t need a body at all.’

When Detective Sean Hastings is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality cult community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin, and bankrolled by a mysterious tech company, VSI.

Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor, VSI’s token QTPOC face, sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world. Meanwhile, Casey, Sean’s ex, hopes Releasing will cure their Long Plague. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears. And the plot twists.

A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?

PRAISE FOR JAW FILLER

‘It’s like The Sluts meets Double Indemnity but everyone is trans. I had an absolute blast.’

– Macy Rodman

‘With Jaw Filler, Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray offer a searing, noir-flavored lens into the world of terminally online guys and our insecurities, fantasies, and wild imaginations of ourselves and each other. I will be discussing this in therapy and billing Charlie and Maz for the expense.’

– James Tom

‘There’s something faintly Brazil about Jaw Filler: wilful and breakneck, self-aware yet never cynical, paranoiac but always coyly – unarguably – plausible. Calling it a pastiche would be stupid. To do so would overlook not only the ravenous delight Jaw Filler takes in the melange of its genre conventions, but also, more importantly, its surgical commitment to grounding a narrative in what I can only succinctly describe as genocide-reality. Murray & Markbreiter have achieved the extremely contemporary and impossible to falsify: true camp darkness.’

– Hesse K., author of Disquiet Drive

OUR SPEAKERS

Maz Murray is an artist who makes films, writing, performances and things. They had their first institutional solo show at Focal Point Gallery in 2024. He’s currently working on a collaborative performance, PLOT HOLE, developed while an awardee at Studio Voltaire.

Charlie Markbreiter is the author of Rapid Onset: Anti-Trans Culture and U.S. Imperial Decline (Bloomsbury, 2027) and Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella (2022). He is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.

So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power.

THIS IS A FREE EVENT. TICKETS CAN BE BOOKED HERE:

https://www.outsavvy.com/event/31891/jaw-filler-in-conversation-maz-murray-charlie-markbreiter-with-so-mayer
Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

Housmans Valentine's Day Special: COURTING DISASTER with Zoë McGee
2026-02-13 19:00 - 20:30
Fan of a Romantic Period Drama? Can’t stand the stuff? Either way, we’ve got the event for you. Come and deconstruct Romance this Valentine’s Day with Housmans and Zoë McGee

We’ll be discussing Zoë’s fabulous new work of Romantic Deconstruction: Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel.

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.

In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway.

Zoë McGee has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and an MSt in eighteenth-century studies from the University of Oxford. She has spoken at conferences internationally and now performs at very nerdy stand-up comedy nights. Among other things, she has worked as a university teacher, a bookseller and a professional board-game-explainer. She owns too many books and is a competitive ballroom dancer in her spare time.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

MAY WE FEED THE KING: Writing Radical Fiction Today with Rebecca Perry & Misha Honcharenko
2026-02-26 19:00 - 20:30
Perry combines effortless exactitude with canny ambiguity to create a novel that is always as stimulating as it is enchanting. ‘May We Feed the King’ is a rare achievement, I absolutely loved it.

Claire-Louise Bennett

We are delighted to welcome two of the most exciting writers working in Britain today, Rebecca Perry and Misha Honcharenko, to Housmans for our first creative writing event of the year. The talk will be focused on Rebecca’s new novel May We Feed The King (Granta), a ‘serial and dreamlike’ (Jessie Burton) work of avant-garde historical fiction that tells the story of ‘ a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.’ Interviewing Rebecca about the book we welcome back Misha Honcharenko, a queer Ukrainian artist and writer whose incredible debut novel Trap Unfolds Me Greedily (Sissy Anarchy) we launched at Housmans back in 2024. The are two writers whose work is in equal parts inventive and alert to the historical circumstances under which it is produced. As the current global order continues to dissolve before our eyes, we ask: what can, or should, ‘fiction’ be now?

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: Frontierlands by Hazel Sheffield
2026-03-05 19:00 - 20:30
‘Hazel Sheffield’s book is a warming remedy to the creeping nihilism many feel about the places where they live,’ Jen Calleja

We are delighted to welcome Hazel Sheffield to the shop to discuss her inspiring new book about Britain’s abandoned and neglected places and the opportunities they present for communities, and how they can help us face the challenges of climate change.

‘Frontierlands’ are Britain’s forgotten places. Silt-filled harbours, overgrown forests, sunken railway tracks and empty buildings. All once economic engines, now abandoned by investors and the state.But they are home to local communities, and amongst them, some remarkable pioneers working together to repair, rebuild and prepare for the future.Hazel Sheffield takes her readers on a journey that begins at the coastline and travels inward via hoardings and railway arches, factories, streets and neighbourhoods to our homes. Moving from Watchet harbour in the South West to Gateshead in the North East, from Lancashire to London and the South East, she introduces us to the people who are acting to shape their own destinies – people with first-hand knowledge of the problems Britain faces and with clear ideas how to make things better.This is a book about regeneration, reclaiming power, and the hope that comes from community action. About people questioning how the world works and determined to do things differently in the face of economic upheaval and climate crisis. People learning to build a new world, challenging us all to think about how we should live in the face of certain change.

Immersive and inspiring, Frontierlands challenges us to reconnect with and reclaim our environment, showing that it is possible to regenerate, reskill and create opportunities for industry, and to address the challenges of climate change

Nadia Idle (Novara Media) will chair a discussion about the book for 45 minutes to an hour. The audience are invited to share their experiences. Hazel will be signing books after the event.

Hazell will speak about the book for around 45 minutes- 1hr followed by a q&a. She will be signing books after the event.As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: The Mixed + Multiracial Guide To Wellbeing with Namalee Bolle
2026-03-07 19:00 - 20:30
Join us for a celebratory evening of radical mixed + multiracial discussion!

“What aaaaarrrrrrrrrreeeeeee you?!”If you just had that familiar sinking feeling, this book is for you. Do you point out how alienating and othering that question is? Stand your ground and explain that you don’t have to justify your existence with a pie chart and a family tree? Or keep the peace, bite your tongue and smile politely at yet another person treating you like a science project? While each mixed person’s experience is different, there are common threads from living in a monoracial world that weave their way into your life. This book explores ways for mixed and multiracial people to recognise how their identity has shaped their life, handle common challenges, and resist othering and erasure.Informed by experience and expertise from both sides of the therapist’s couch, the Mixed + Multiracial Guide to Wellbeing shows you how to handle microaggressions, confront systemic issues, and control your own story.

The Mixed + Multiracial Guide to Wellbeing is a timely, compassionate and quietly radical book that speaks to a fast-growing yet persistently overlooked readership.

Reviews:

‘Namalee Bolle successfully brings her readers into an impressive gathering of voices that give depth and breadth to the mixed and multiracial experience. This book invites us all to bring a deeper understanding to our own identities, and the ways we find belonging and meaning in the world’

Marcia Bonato Warren MA MA LPC, author of Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching

‘Bolle examines the complexities of mixed-race identity and confronts them with thoughtful, tangible solutions. The Mixed + Multiracial Guide to Wellbeing is a relatable and fascinating read for anyone who’s ever fielded the question, “What are you?” And essential for anyone who’s asked it’

Nabil Ayers, author of My Life in the Sunshine

OUR SPEAKERS:

Namalee Bolle is a London-based multidisciplinary artist, transpersonal transcultural integrative psychotherapist and award winning writer. She is British born of Sri-Lankan and Dutch-Jewish heritage and her work explores themes of multicultural identity, intergenerational trauma and post-traumatic thriving. With a background as SUPERSUPER! magazine co-founder Namalee was featured in Pioneers: A Renaissance in South Asian Creativity at the British Maritime Museum. Her work has been published in The Guardian, I-D, Dazed,The London Evening Standard, Vogue and ShowSTUDIO.

Jassa Ahluwalia is a British actor, writer, filmmaker and trade unionist. Born in Coventry to a white English mum and a brown Punjabi dad, he came to prominence as Rocky in the hit BBC Three series Some Girls, followed by starring roles in Unforgotten, Ripper Street, and Peaky Blinders. Jassa created the hashtag #BothNotHalf to explore mixed identity in light of his own British-Indian heritage. His TEDx talk on How Language Shapes Identity has clocked up over 170k views and his BBC One documentary Am I English? won an Asian Media Award in 2022. His book Both Not Half: A Radical New Approach to Mixed Identity is out now from Bonnier Books.

Namalee and Jassa will talk for around 45 minutes to 1hr followed by a Q&A with the audience.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK TALK: Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century: Laurent de Sutter in conversation with Alfie Bown
2026-03-17 19:00 - 20:30
Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs.— Avital Ronell, New York University

We welcome back the brilliant Alfie Bown to Housmans, this time in the company of Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter. The two will be focusing their conversation on the nature and necessity (or, rather, superfluity [as posited by Laurent]) of critique. As a jumping off point they will be using Laurent’s recent work of theory, Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century. The book is described below:

‘We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject.

If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.

Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.’

Professor Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France.

Dr Alfie Bown is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022), an investigation into dating apps, sexbots and virtual relationships, Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024), Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019) and The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), a psychoanalytic study of video games which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak and many other languages. Currently, he is working on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics. He is also editor of Everyday Analysis, a pamphlet house and monthly talk series.

Alfie and Laurent will talk for around one hour, we will then have an open discussion. At Housmans, we welcome debate and challenging ideas, so please do attend in that spirit.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: RADICAL JUSTICE: Building the World We Need with Nani Jansen Reventlow
2026-03-19 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans are delighted to be hosting an event around this essential new book — a stalwart guide to strengthen the movement for freedom and equality for all.

Our society is breaking down. Fascists are winning elections, economic inequality is rampant, and the climate crisis is at its tipping point. It feels like the amount of work needed to overcome these injustices is too much to handle. But what if there is a way to lower the threshold to action? Who will free us if not ourselves?

In Radical Justice, international human rights lawyer Nani Jansen Reventlow shows how we can build a fundamentally different future with our own hands. We all have our own spheres of influence, and each of us can be the revolution.

Taking inspiration from the deep well of anti-racist and social activist writers such as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Angela Davis, each chapter offers tips on how to learn, reflect and act in a society where we are told we are powerless. Including advice on strategic litigation, reclaiming our digital rights, reparations demands, climate activism and much more, the information in these pages is indispensable to the struggle for radical justice.

Nani Jansen Reventlow is an international human rights lawyer. She is the founder of Systemic Justice, which advocates for marginalised communities through strategic litigation. Politico named her one of society’s great visionary tech leaders for her work on digital human rights. She has also been honoured with awards from Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Universities.

Nani will be hosted in conversation by intersectional feminist advocate Saranel Benjamin for 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

Marco Perolini launches 'Migration and Mobile Rights'
2026-03-20 18:30 - 21:00
Activism, Racial Justice, and Human Rights from Below

Please note this an externally organised event. You can RSVP using this link:

https://www.easy-rsvp.com/G3uqJ0-book-launch-migration-and-mobile-rights
Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

SOLD OUT!: Suicide by Roger Hallam
2026-03-25 19:00 - 20:30
SOLD OUT

Housmans welcome Roger Hallam to discuss his essential new book: Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act. From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam—farmer, researcher, and co-founder of Just Stop Oil—delivers a searing indictment of a legal system that punishes those who resist, while protecting those who destroy. In July 2024, Hallam was dragged from a British courtroom for refusing to stay silent about the climate crisis. For “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” he was sentenced to five years in prison—the harshest punishment for civil disobedience in the UK in modern British history. The case made front-page news and drew global outcry.

Suicide is part memoir, part political reckoning. Drawing on Hallam’s award-winning research and experience representing himself in four Crown Court trials, it lays bare the moral and legal failures of a society sleepwalking into catastrophe. From climate science and the right of necessity, to the collapse of democratic norms and the illusions of secular reason, this is a radical call to rethink justice, truth, and duty in the face of extinction.

please note this event is now sold out. There will be no tickets on the door.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK TALK: PUNK SPIRIT!
2026-05-05 19:00 - 20:30
AN ORAL HISTORY OF PUNK ROCK, SPIRITUALITY AND LIBERATION

We are super excited to welcome John Malkin over from California to talk about his incredible, and as far as we can tell, unique, book: Punk Spirit! We’ve had countless books about punk (not to mention zines) pass through Housmans over the year but none that quite approach the topic from this angle.

Punk Spirit! is an oral history that examines this movement from many unique perspectives, bringing together well-known and cutting-edge bands including Sex Pistols, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, The Ramones, Gang of Four, Pussy Riot, Crass, Talking Heads, Propagandhi, The Slits, Bad Religion, Shelter, Rebel Riot, Blackfire, and many others.

Punk Spirit! ventures into the emotional and personal experiences of punk artists and activists from around the world and highlights intelligent, thoughtful, and humorous discussions on liberation, spirituality, and living freely. They discuss a myriad of topics from creativity and anger to freedom from suffering and the ways that punk rock has opposed or embodied religious and moral tenets. Chapters dive deeply into a variety of interconnected realms of punk rock such as the subgenre of straight edge, Krishnacore and Taqwacore, evangelical punk concerts in southern California churches, illegal punk concerts in East German churches, anti-religious sentiment within punk rock, the vital connections between punk and self-expression, and the myriad ways punk rock has been combined with spiritual and religious traditions to illuminate ideas from science, atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other ways of being in the world.

And complete with a forward by one of our favorite writers, Penny Rimbaud! How could we have said no?!

John Malkin is a journalist, musician, activist, photographer and filmmaker. He is the author of Punk Revolution!: An Oral History of Punk Rock Politics and Activism , and his interviews and writings have been published in internationally including Adbusters, Punk Planet, Razorcake, Spirituality & Health, Z Magazine, Ode, In These Times, Sojourners, The Sun, Film International, Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Friends Journal, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, The Monterey Herald, and others. He lives in Santa Cruz, California with his wife and son.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

SOLD OUT: REVOLUTIONARY FORGIVENESS: D. K. RENTON in conversation with Barnaby Raine
2026-05-08 19:00 - 20:30
THIS EVENT IT NOW SOLD OUT. TO BE ADDED TO A WAITING LIST PLEASE EMAIL SHOP@HOUSMANS.COM

Housmans are delighted to welcome the legendary theorist, thinker and lawyer D.K. Renton to launch what we believe may be one of the most original, and vital, works of left wing thought to appear in recent years. He will be joined in conversation by the scholar and journalist Barnaby Raine.

Forgiveness is necessary in the long fight for a just world—but it is only possible after the oppressed are victorious

For too long, revolutionary social movements have reconciled to defeat. We must start winning again. Forgiveness is a crucial strategy for remaking the world, to secure and sustain victories, to transform one-time enemies into friends. With deep political commitment, D. K. Renton makes the case for forgiveness—but of a particularly unruly sort. Tracing the tragic abuse of Eleanor Marx and Jane Wells, the mistakes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye, Renton urges us to forgive, but only after tearing down the citadels of the rich.

Revolutionary Forgiveness connects collective struggle with the individual’s search for justice to demand a better future for all—when the oppressed will be magnanimous in power, and even former oppressors will be free.

“Renton rescues ‘forgiveness’ from the pulpit and returns it, bloodied but lucid, to history.”

— Richard Seymour, author of Disaster Nationalism

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

THIS EVENT IT NOW SOLD OUT. TO BE ADDED TO A WAITING LIST PLEASE EMAIL SHOP@HOUSMANS.COM

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: The Forest Fights Back with Jessica den Outer
2026-05-19 19:00 - 20:30
Join Us For A Discussion Of A Global Movement for the Rights of Nature with Jessica den Outer in conversation with Grant Wilson

As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.

In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement—Rights of Nature—taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity.

This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature.

Our Speakers:

Jessica den Outer is an expert in environmental law who advocates globally for the Rights of Nature. Since 2017, she’s been consulted and has spoken for institutions like the UN and Harvard. She founded the NGO ‘Stichting Rechten van de Natuur’ and has received numerous awards for her pioneering work. She will be in conversation with Grant Wilson, Executive Director of Earth Law Center. He is an expert on the Rights of Nature, ecocentric law, and international environmental law.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: THE PLOT IS ON FIRE: Manuela Zechner in conversation with Max Haiven
2026-05-27 19:00 - 20:30
We are delighted to welcome Manuela Zechner to Housmans to talk about her truly original and radical work in postcolonial eco-theory.

As myths of progress and modernisation collapse in the relentless polycrisis of our time, how do we strengthen other plots—in community, practice and struggle? How do we come together as movements for earthcare?

The Plot is on Fire: Care Struggles after Progress, Plantation and Patriarchy weaves stories, proposals, and analyses around a key domain of living reproduction in crisis: agriculture. Looking at peasant, indigenous, and transecofeminist practices, it formulates another plot on how we want to sustain life collectively—beyond progress, plantation, and patriarchy.

Recovering and repurposing old and new technologies, and breaking down the division between rural and urban, the ground is made fertile for growing other futures. Alongside writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, this work of radical political theory raises critical questions about technology and storytelling, as matters of care and community.

Manuela will be in conversation with Max Haiven author of Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto). They will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour followed by a discussion with the audience.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

HOUSMANS POETRY SERIES
2026-05-29 08:00 - 17:00
INTRODUCING THE FIRST IN OUR POET’S PROSE SEQUENCE

We are delighted to welcome two extremely exciting poets to Housmans for the first installment of our Summer Poetry Series. This season we’re going to be doing something a bit different and focusing instead on the work that poets produce outside of ‘traditional’ lyric modes; focusing instead on prose; novels; novellas; novelettes; essays; criticism; chunks of memoir and ‘hybrid’ lumps.

Opening the series we have two poets whose work (and dual radiant vibe) need very little introduction (to those who’ve been following literary avant-gardes in Britain for the last decade or so): Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere. Between them they compose the centripetal force of Glasgow’s celebrated post-internet DIY publishing project SPAM and have produced a truly terrifying volume of exceedingly brilliant poetry collections, scholarly work and experiments.

At Housmans they will be discussing their recent experiments in fiction writing: Kirsty’s Centrefolding and Maria’s The Indigo Hours.

Centrefolding follows an unnamed protagonist who shifts, sprints, swerves and transmorphs through the “Centre!” (exclamation mark required), a research institute in some northern British city, in our current jittery moment. Glitches in reality abound: expect research into alien life that goes nowhere, an underground hospital, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and ‘lingerers’ slithering under glass doors (you know, like a worm). Daisy Lafarge says it is her ‘dream novelette: gossipy, pacy, and full of gorgeous swerves of language. With enviable wit and inventiveness’.

The Indigo Hours is an immersive, radiant text that moves between autofiction, essay, and poetic prose to document the textures of contemporary longing. Centred around a seasonal arc and filtered through the ambient melancholia of late capitalism, the work refracts emotional experience through media, memory, pop culture, and shifting landscapes—from Berlin pools to prairie towns, from night buses to art galleries. Sledmere’s sentences are lush, recursive, and sensorily attuned, sustaining a rhythmic, diaristic lyricism that continually folds the personal into the atmospheric. What emerges is a powerful reckoning with intimacy, grief, and temporality at the edges of digital and embodied life. ‘Maria Sledmere tells a post-Romantic tale of moonlit precarity and passion among pools & thunderstorms & prairies & airports…’ says Poppy Cockburn.

Both poets will read from their work, discuss shared ideas, themes, feelings and forms. As always with our poetry series, we encourage you to byob and the spirit of celebration and conversation. If we have time we might engage in a more general conversation on the nature of poetry, prose and other aesthetic modes gurgling up thru this current zombied epoch of slow collapse and cultural amnesia. (‘Why do all the poets write novels now, anyway??’ we might ask.)

This is a free event, but we have limited capacity so please do book ahead using the link below.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK TALK: Absolute Ethical Life: Michael Lazarus in conversation with Bruno Leipold
2026-06-15 19:00 - 20:30
Aristotle, Hegel and Marx: Michael Lazarus In Conversation with Bruno Leipold

Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today.

Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx’s work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx’s value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement.

In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the “form of value,” Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital.

Michael Lazarus will be joined in conversation with Bruno Leipold. We expect the conversation to last from around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by an open discussion with the audience.

Our Speakers:

Michael Lazarus is Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Before coming to King’s, he was Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. He holds a PhD in Politics from Monash University. His research covers major themes and thinkers in political theory, political economy and moral philosophy.Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, published by Stanford University Press, is his first book. He is currently working on a second book project related to the ideas of labour, money and colonialism in Adam Smith and G.W.F. Hegel. In addition to his many scholarly publications, he regularly writes for non-academic venues.

Bruno Leipold teaches at the London School of Economics. He works on the thought of Karl Marx, the republican political tradition, democratic theory and nineteenth-century political thought. He is the author of Citizen Marx (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the co-editor of Radical Republicanism (Oxford University Press, 2020). Before coming to the LSE, he held post-doctoral positions at The New Institute, the European University Institute and the Goethe University Frankfurt, and he received his DPhil from the University of Oxford.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: THE NEXT FIX by KOJO KARAM
2026-06-16 19:00 - 20:30
The question is no longer if we should legalise drugs. It’s: what happens when we do?

The future of drugs is here, and it’s dangerously unequal. Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen — and who stands to benefit?

Join us as we welcome the brilliant Kojo Karam to Housmans to celebrate the launch of his essential, brilliant and harrowing new book. In The Next Fix, award-winning author Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?

Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over – or merely changing its chemical formula.

‘Brilliantly arranged and rich with fresh insights‘ Akala

‘A radical, beautifully written understanding of our history‘ Owen Jones

Kojo Koram is a Professor of Law, author and investigative journalist. This year he co-founded a new global research centre at Loughborough University which will examine how drug markets are changing. Born in Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. In addition to his academic work, he regularly contributes to the Guardian and Novara Media and has also written for the New Statesman and NYT. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth (2022) which won the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and was a Guardian book of the year.

Kojo will read from the book, followed by a discussion that should last for around 45 minutes. We will then have a q&a. The shop has limited space, so please book ahead to avoid disappointment.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

HOUSING READING SERIES: HUW LEMMEY IN CONVERSATION WITH JULIET JACQUES
2026-07-18 19:00 - 21:00
Aren’t you just SICK of gay fiction about nice boys just trying their best? BOREDof the sort of cosy political satire that makes Alistair Campbell chuckle?

FINALLY! After years of waiting, Huw Lemmey’s cult classics are back in print::CHUBZ: The Demonization of My Working Arse and RED TORY: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell,two novels of terrifying predictive force and eye-watering sexual potency, an antidoteto the grimly worthy bourgeois queer novels and tedious political fiction of our time.Lemmey’s novels depict the loopy political world of the past decade with the powerof a vicious Cassandra, imagining a world of Brexit and Trump, PM’s Boris and Nigel,years before they came to pass. Set within a London gripped between authoritarianismand a genuine rupture in the healthy sexual order of things, CHUBZ and RED TORYremain the sleeper hits of our time, quietly seeding disquiet and insurrection into theover-stimulated lizard brain and under-stimulated rectal ampulla of the GREAT British Public.

Obscene? Potentially. Criminal? Maybe. Sick? Probably. But worth buying? UNDENIABLY!

Join the author LIVE and IN FULL FLESHY PERSONHOOD at Housmans, in conversationwith the esteemed political-cultural powerhouse Juliet Jacques, to discuss these arse-warping,mind-bending SATIRES FOR OUR TIME. Run, don’t walk!

This is a free event, but if you would like to reserve a copy of the book(s), you can saw so through the ticket portal

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

BOOK LAUNCH: INTERNATIONAL FREAK ROBIN FARQUHARSON AND THE DREAM OF PSYCHEDELIC REVOLT
2026-07-29 19:00 - 20:30
M. SYD ROSEN AND OWEN HATHERLEY DISCUSS THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF COUNTERCULTURAL ICON ROBIN FARQUHARSON

‘Rosen is an intergenerational talent. That is, he seems to move effortlessly across decades, from dark matter to illumination; gleaning, recovering, challenging, making new.’

Iain Sinclair

Born in 1930 into a privileged South African family, Robin Farquharson was part of a new wave of intellectuals tasked with reimagining society in the wake of World War II—until a phone call from God brought everything crashing down.

Under the gaze of the secret police and his own mounting paranoia, Farquharson fled to Swinging London and tried to reinvent himself as a countercultural guru. Along the way, he helped to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games, authored an unclassifiable memoir of queer street life, and climbed to the top of the mysterious White Panther Party. Then, just days after founding the pioneering Mental Patients Union, flames ripped through his home and Farquharson was gone.

Drawing on meticulous archival research and extensive new interviews, International Freak marshals an extraordinary cast of characters in order to tell Farquharson’s story for the first time. Equal parts experimental biography, social history, and psychedelic true crime, this is a portrait of a singular man and the world he sought desperately to transform.

We are delighted to welcome M. Syd Rosen (author of this utterly compelling biography) and Owen Hatherley to Housmans to discuss the life of this truly remarkable hero of counter cultural Britain.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…

Book Launch: Liquid Reflections with Liliane Lijn
2026-09-04 19:00 - 20:30
We are profoundly honored to be hosting the paperback launch for a memoir by one the world’s greatest living artists, the sculptor Liliane Lijn, who will be joined in conversation by leading art writer Jennifer Higgie.

Liliane Lijn is an artist who needs little introduction. Her stirring, often ostentatious and always poetic works are dotted throughout the British urban landscape, and overseas. Regular visitors to Housmans will have no doubt seen her recent piece Temenos just up the road from us, near Granary Square.

We will host Liliane May 2nd to launch the paperback edition of her brilliant bildungsroman Liquid Reflections. The book begins in 1958 with the talented and fearless Liliane Lijn leaving her family home and moving to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And as her profile steadily grew, she was told again and again that there are no great women artists: ‘There never have been.’

Liquid Reflections is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure – years when Lijn was constantly in motion, from Paris to New York to Venice to Athens, from paper and canvas to wax and Perspex to oil and water. In love, she became pregnant but rebelled against the idea that a woman could not be both a great artist and a mother. And she sought – and found – radical pleasure in the act of creative expression and in the living, sensuous world around her.

Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman.

‘I wrote LIQUID REFLECTIONS because I wanted to take my readers on the journey I made to become an artist. It’s the story of an idealistic, inspired young woman who refuses to accept the prejudices of her time. Becoming an artist was also a search for my own identity…’ — Liliane Lijn

Liliane will be conversation with the art writer Jennifer Higgie, author of numerous books, her most recent being The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, the first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world.

This is going to be an extremely special event and we are delighted to be hosting it. Please do book a ticket in advance to avoid disappointment on the night.

Liliane and Jennifer will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by an open discussion with the audience.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Share this:
Share on X (Opens in new window)
X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Facebook

Share on Insta (Opens in new window)
Insta
Like this:Like Loading…
