BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Housmans Bookshop - ECPv6.17.0//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://housmans.com X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Housmans Bookshop REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20250330T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20251026T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20260329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20261025T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20270328T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20271031T010000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260729T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260729T203000 DTSTAMP:20260603T155503Z CREATED:20260603T143903Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260603T155503Z UID:79289-1785351600-1785357000@housmans.com SUMMARY:BOOK LAUNCH: INTERNATIONAL FREAK ROBIN FARQUHARSON AND THE DREAM OF PSYCHEDELIC REVOLT DESCRIPTION:M. SYD ROSEN AND OWEN HATHERLEY DISCUSS THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF COUNTERCULTURAL ICON ROBIN FARQUHARSON \n\n\n\n‘Rosen is an intergenerational talent. That is\, he seems to move effortlessly across decades\, from dark matter to illumination; gleaning\, recovering\, challenging\, making new.’ \n\n\n\n Iain Sinclair \n\n\n\nBorn 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. \n\n\n\nUnder 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. \n\n\n\nDrawing 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. \n\n\n\nWe 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. \n\n\n\nAs 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. \n\n\n\nIf 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. \n\n\n\nDoors Open at 6:45pm\, Event Starts 7:00. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShare this:\n Share on X (Opens in new window)\n X\n \n Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)\n Facebook\n \n Share on Insta (Opens in new window)\n Insta\n Like this:Like Loading… URL:https://housmans.com/event/book-launch-international-freak-robin-farquharson-and-the-dream-of-psychedelic-revolt/ CATEGORIES:Book Launch,Book Talk ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/International-Freak-23.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260801T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260801T220000 DTSTAMP:20260629T130948Z CREATED:20260629T122120Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260629T130948Z UID:80047-1785610800-1785621600@housmans.com SUMMARY:HOUSMANS READING SERIES: Valerie Hsiung with Verity Spott\, Andrea Brady and others DESCRIPTION:We are delighted to welcome the incredible Valerie Hsiung to Housmans\, visiting us from the mountains of Colorado in USA. Joining her we have some of the finest poets working in Britain today. \n\n\n\nWe will be celebrating Valerie’s latest book\, The pedestrian: a poet’s novel\, a body\, a house\, where childhood ungrieved meets the horror of displacement. \n\n\n\nEmerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story\, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma\, the poet becomes a ritual detective\, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement\, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds\, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks\, attuned to forces beyond itself. \n\n\n\nPRAISE: \n\n\n\nWhy are some people’s pores open in their aloneness? Valerie Hsiung asks\, in this\, the most—maybe only—honest biography I’ve ever read. Is it a biography? It is the consequence of a porousness (i.e. of being perforated) that seems to be the consequence\, in turn\, of being made to live the impossible state of perpetual estrangement as self-enchantment\, the impermanent state of metamorphosis as permanence. Hsiung’s writing has accompanied and seen me through so many incarnations; I am ready for what The pedestrian will make of me—will make of all of us—next. \n\n\n\n-Brandon Shimoda \n\n\n\nThe pedestrian is intimate as an ultrasound of the past\, revealing a many-chambered organ haunted by someones\, somethings and others. A cross between medium and technician\, Valerie Hsiung meticulously probes the uncanny gap between before and after with a language devised for this purpose and no other. Precise\, unflinching and subtle\, Hsiung’s sentences shift to meet the unspeakable where it lives—within. \n\n\n\n-Anne de Marcken \n\n\n\nSilky grief\, kinetic gaps and dislocations\, and a potent\, trance-like narration that brushes and brushes against the inarticulable. Valerie Hsiung’s The pedestrian is entirely outside of category\, awakening nerves long dormant through its gorgeous obliquity\, its charge of fresh music. The hypnosis is plainly startling\, entangling the reader and guiding her into the most otherworldly of spaces: the other worlds rushing forth\, ungovernable\, inside this one. In place of the usual tired meanings comes the largesse of mystery and deeper\, stranger voices. The pedestrian is an antidote ampule to memory’s cliches. No\, not just memory’s cliches—to any force that conspires to sever the dreaming from the waking. \n\n\n\n-Jenny Xie \n\n\n\nThe pedestrian is a map to a terrain of shards and shadows. While reading it\, I felt lost only to the land of the normative\, a lush fugitivity. I traveled far with\, because of\, and in this book. Hsiung trusts in the politics of decomposition\, making syntaxes that have been distorted by grief\, and thus sharpened to what cannot be colonially extracted. Writers like this know that grammar\, vocabulary\, and the sentence itself are haunted\, so they write not to exorcise or cure this condition of its ghosts\, but to make a place for them to live\, a place they belong. \n\n\n\n– Johanna Hedva \n\n\n\nTwo is a confounding number\, asserting\, through its adjacency to one\, the split from which consciousness proceeds. In the third person\, Valerie establishes a self in two parts\, living two lives\, witnessing in memory an architecture of diasporic remembrance at odds with Proustian time. The past in The pedestrian is cellular—replicated\, split\, migrated— its membranes stretched by Valerie’s devoted prose\, its unsentimental attunement to the fray of love and loss. She renders what’s closest—a mother\, a house\, a child—radically extimate. An inversion inviting\, at the turn of every mundane gesture\, history’s ravenous ghost (eating is always a reminder of hunger). Legs splayed open\, birthing herself with each new paragraph\, She is a revelation. She shows how perfect the sentence can be as a place to keep the wound active. A staggering act of containment enabling us to remain in touch with the break\, and to find\, in the split\, all of life’s surplus. \n\n\n\n-Mirene Arsanios \n\n\n\nOUR POETS: \n\n\n\nAmelia Zhou is a writer and researcher. Her book Repose\, which interweaves poems\, fiction\, and lyric essay\, was awarded the 2022 Wendy’s Subway Book Prize and published in 2024. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Cambridge\, where her research examines the political-aesthetic role of photographic images and tropes in predominantly Anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present. She is also currently the Emerging Critics Fellow at the Sydney Review of Books. Born and raised in Sydney\, she lives in London.  \n\n\n\nAzad Ashim Sharma is a writer and publisher based in South London. He is the director of the87press. His work includes Against the Frame (Broken Sleep Books\, 2022) and Ergastulum (Broken Sleep Books\, 2022). His work has featured in publications such as the Asian American Writers Workshop\, Stand Magazine\, Gutter Magazine\, the journal Social and Health Sciences\, SPAMzine\, MIR Online\, and Wasafiri. He is a Chase-funded PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College\, University of London. He is the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023. He lives in London.  \n\n\n\nVerity Spott is a poet\, blogger\, teacher\, carer and musician from Brighton\, England\, and publisher of the independent publishing house Iodine Press. Verity’s books include Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband\, 2017)\, Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press\, 2018)\, Hopelessness (The 87 Press\, 2020)\, Songs of the Morning (slub\, 2023) and The North Road Songbook (Pilot Press\, 2024). Since 2006\, Spott has run the monthly poetry and performance event Horseplay in Brighton. \n\n\n\nAndrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of eight books of poetry including\, Desiring Machines\, The Blue Split Compartments\, The Strong Room\, and Cut from the Rushes. She has performed in Europe\, Canada\, the US\, Lebanon\, and Chile\, and has been invited to speak about poetry by the British Academy\, British Council\, the BBC\, the Arts Council\, and the Poetry Society. Her work has been translated into numerous languages\, including French\, German\, and Croatian. \n\n\n\nGhazal Mosadeq is a poet\, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press\, an independent publisher of poetry\, translation\, hybrid and critical writing. Her own work has been published by Sheirsman\, Fence\, Arc Poetry\, Firmament\, Asymptote\, Modern Poetry In Translation and Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming)\, among others. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. \n\n\n\nValerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds\, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic\, ecological\, and metaphysical inquiry\, her books dissolve the borders of poetry\, prose\, performance and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books\, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books)\, The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse)\, The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath)\, To love an artist (Essay Press)\, and outside voices\, please (CSU). Recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and Lighthouse Works as well as grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and PEN America\, she teaches writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her ceremonial work and pedagogy has been studied by researchers on the subject of emancipatory practices including Sophie Orlando. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati\, Ohio\, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado. \n\n\n\nPlease note this is a free event but please do book ahead. You can also reserve a copy of the book. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShare this:\n Share on X (Opens in new window)\n X\n \n Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)\n Facebook\n \n Share on Insta (Opens in new window)\n Insta\n Like this:Like Loading… URL:https://housmans.com/event/housmans-reading-series-valerie-hsiung-with-verity-spott-andrea-brady-and-others/ CATEGORIES:Book Launch,Book Talk,In Store ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Poetry-Series-Valerie-.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260904T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260904T203000 DTSTAMP:20260506T115422Z CREATED:20260413T154853Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260506T115422Z UID:77658-1788548400-1788553800@housmans.com SUMMARY:Book Launch: Liquid Reflections with Liliane Lijn DESCRIPTION: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.\n\n\n\nLiliane 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. \n\n\n\nWe 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.’ \n\n\n\nLiquid 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. \n\n\n\nBased 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. \n\n\n\n‘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 \n\n\n\nLiliane 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. \n\n\n\nThis 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. \n\n\n\nLiliane and Jennifer will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour\, followed by an open discussion with the audience. \n\n\n\nAs 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. \n\n\n\nIf 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. \n\n\n\nDoors Open at 6:45pm\, Event Starts 7:00. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShare this:\n Share on X (Opens in new window)\n X\n \n Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)\n Facebook\n \n Share on Insta (Opens in new window)\n Insta\n Like this:Like Loading… URL:https://housmans.com/event/book-launch-liquid-reflections-with-liliane-lijn/ CATEGORIES:Book Launch,Book Talk,In Store ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/webp:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/9781405967471-jacket-large.webp END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR