BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Housmans Bookshop - ECPv6.16.4.1//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:20260503T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260503T203000 DTSTAMP:20260503T161003Z CREATED:20260503T161001Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260503T161003Z UID:78547-1777834800-1777840200@housmans.com SUMMARY:BOOK LAUNCH: PRIVATISING HUMANITY BY KATE BAYLIS DESCRIPTION:JOIN KATE BAYLIS AND ADRIENNE BULLER FOR AN ESSENTIAL CONVERSATON ON HOW BASIC HUMAN NEEDS BECOME FINANCIAL ASSETS.\n\n\n\n Privatising Humanity is a powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets. \n\n\n\nWe have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves\, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Virtually all aspects of our lives are now targeted by someone seeking to make a profit. \n\n\n\nIn Privatising Humanity\, Kate Bayliss shows how wealthy investors\, including asset managers\, target our essential services. When it comes to investments in these sectors\, shareholder profits are funded by us\, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water\, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that often generate massive returns for investors and dysfunctional systems for society. \n\n\n\nUnpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK – water\, energy and housing – Bayliss exposes the harmful consequences of this model\, which is contributing to deepening inequality. \n\n\n\nKate Baylis will joined by Adrienne Buller\, author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (a Housmans Top 10 for many months in 2022). They with be in conversation for around 45 minutes to an hour\, followed by a q&a and signing session. \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-privatising-humanity-by-kate-baylis/ CATEGORIES:In Store,Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/81Fwp1BcN2L._SL1500_-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260508T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260508T203000 DTSTAMP:20260507T141651Z CREATED:20260415T135408Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260507T141651Z UID:77744-1778266800-1778272200@housmans.com SUMMARY:SOLD OUT: REVOLUTIONARY FORGIVENESS: D. K. RENTON in conversation with Barnaby Raine DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT IT NOW SOLD OUT. TO BE ADDED TO A WAITING LIST PLEASE EMAIL SHOP@HOUSMANS.COM\n\n\n\nHousmans 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. \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\nForgiveness is necessary in the long fight for a just world—but it is only possible after the oppressed are victorious \n\n\n\nFor 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. \n\n\n\nRevolutionary 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. \n\n\n\n“Renton rescues ‘forgiveness’ from the pulpit and returns it\, bloodied but lucid\, to history.” \n\n\n\n— Richard Seymour\, author of Disaster Nationalism \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\nTHIS EVENT IT NOW SOLD OUT. TO BE ADDED TO A WAITING LIST PLEASE EMAIL SHOP@HOUSMANS.COM \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-revolutionary-forgiveness-by-d-k-renton/ CATEGORIES:Book Launch,Book Talk,In Store,Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260601T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260601T203000 DTSTAMP:20260601T160454Z CREATED:20260526T161718Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260601T160454Z UID:79112-1780340400-1780345800@housmans.com SUMMARY:BOOK TALK: Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai DESCRIPTION:When Xiao Hai turned fifteen\, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1\,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China’s fast-growing southern cities. \n\n\n\nAdrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century\, making iPhones and baby clothes\, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios. Here\, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life\, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living\, working\, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing. \n\n\n\nThis memoir is a landmark text from China’s migrant worker literature movement\, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world’s second-biggest economy. \n\n\n\nXiao Hai will conversation for around 45 minutes to an hour\, followed by a q&a and signing session. \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-talk-adrift-in-the-south-by-xiao-hai/ CATEGORIES:In Store,Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/9781738536269.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260624T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260624T203000 DTSTAMP:20260610T160219Z CREATED:20260610T160151Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260610T160219Z UID:79472-1782327600-1782333000@housmans.com SUMMARY:MAGAZINE LAUNCH: WEEKEND DESCRIPTION:COME AND CELEBRATE THE LAUNCH OF A BOLD NEW POETRY MAGAZINE AT HOUSMANS. FEATURING LUKE ROBERTS\, HARRIET ROSE AND OTHERS. \n\n\n\nThis is a free event\, please book your tickets below. Feel free to BYOB. 🙂 \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/magazine-launch-weekend/ CATEGORIES:Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Weekend-6-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260704T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260704T203000 DTSTAMP:20260604T113510Z CREATED:20260604T113508Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260604T113510Z UID:79314-1783191600-1783197000@housmans.com SUMMARY:DREAMS AND GHOSTS WITH DOMINIC PETTMAN & EVERYDAY ANALYSIS DESCRIPTION:Join us for a conversation between two of the most exciting theorists of the digital realm\, Dominic Pettman and Alfie Bown \n\n\n\nWe are delighted to welcome our friends Everyday Analysis back to Housmans for what promises to be another stimulating reflection on the agonies and aporias of contemporary culture. \n\n\n\nThis time we have Dominic Pettman joining us\, to talk about some of the recurrent ideas that animate\, his recent publications\, The Forgetting of Dreams: Selected Oneiric Residues (published by Everyday Analysis) and Ghosting: On Disappearance (Polity\, 2025). \n\n\n\nDominic is emerging as one of our major theorists of the digital world. His work is especially accomplished at interrogating modes of disconnection\, loneliness and alienation that could only really exist now; in an epoch almost entirely mediated through a digital reflection of itself. \n\n\n\nblurbs: \n\n\n\nThe Forgetting of Dreams: Selected Oneiric Residues \n\n\n\nWe process our lives through riddles\, mysteries\, ciphers\, and enigmas – but we hesitate to share these with friends and family. In times gone by\, as for Freud\, dreams were considered a key to cosmic secrets. Today\, in all sorts of ways – both subtle and not – we are discouraged from sharing the content of our dreams\, unless we happen to be indulging in that most anachronistic ritual: lying prostrate on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Anywhere else\, an anecdote that begins\, “Last night I dreamed . . .” is usually met with a sigh and a defensive glazing of the eyes. In our over-burdened world\, any sharing of dreams is always already perceived as over-sharing. Contrary to this\, Pettman argues – the more we share tales of our isolated nocturnal journeys\, the better chance we have to understand the topography of our collective conundrum.  \n\n\n\nGhosting: On Disappearance \n\n\n\nAbandonment is as old as time\, but ghosting is a modern twist on this ancient experience. It translates this age-old phenomenon into our modern world of screens\, delete buttons and blocking options. Ghosting is not only an unpleasant experience\, or cowardly act\, but a symptom of our increasingly spectral – that is\, mediated and virtual – relationship to the world. The overabundance of new modes of communication has invited an almost infinite number of contacts and conversations. At the same time\, it has also offered an unprecedented opportunity for ignoring messages from others. And just as we invented the car crash when we invented automobiles\, we also encouraged ghosting when we created the internet. \n\n\n\nGhosting creates an empty space in our minds: a space faithfully tracing the silhouette of the one who ghosted us. But unlike traditional ghosts\, today’s ghosters simply disappear\, leaving behind a form of haunting that is closer to mourning: mourning for someone who is not in fact dead. In putting a kind of preemptive mourning into our everyday affairs\, ghosting tells us much about the current human relationship – or non-relationship – to a shared sense of mortality\, purpose\, and spirit.   \n\n\n\nThis book – the first sustained analysis of ghosting – traces the source of this vexed experience to\, and through\, our current media ecology\, technological networks\, political landscape\, collective psychology\, romantic mantras\, and deep sense of social neglect. \n\n\n\nDominic will be joined by the brilliant Alfie Bown\, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at King’s College London. Alfie is the author of numerous brilliant interventions into the worlds of digital studies\, Marxism and psychoanalysis. His most recent books are Alfie Bown\, Post-Comedy (Polity\, 2024) and Dream Lovers: Capitalism and the Gamification of Relationships (London: Pluto\, 2022). \n\n\n\nThis is a free event\, but you can reserve copies of the books through our ticket portal. \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/dreams-and-ghosts-with-dominic-pettman-everyday-analysis/ CATEGORIES:In Store,Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/preeti-insta-16.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260710T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260710T210000 DTSTAMP:20260624T165257Z CREATED:20260624T163946Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260624T165257Z UID:79973-1783710000-1783717200@housmans.com SUMMARY:HOUSMANS READING SERIES: LUKE ROBERTS PRESENTS 'BAD OMENS' DESCRIPTION:POET’S PROSE #2\n\n\n\nFor the next instalment of Poet’s Prose sequence (a series of events celebrating cross-disciplinary efforts by radical anglophone poets experimenting outside of the traditional lyric form) we welcome to Housmans the inimitable Luke Roberts\, who will be reading from his new book of essays\, aphorisms\, contemplations\, Bad Omens. \n\n\n\nDrawn from a decade’s worth of notebooks and journals\, Bad Omens is a lyrical narrative of art and grief in a time of crisis. From London’s pollen-covered streets to wildfires in Idaho\, gravesides in Paris to the Blackpool seafront\, we greet a landscape of lost causes\, unreasonable demands\, and utopian horizons. It’s ‘the part of the century where we’re losing our grip’\, and someone somewhere is owed an explanation. \n\n\n\nBad Omens struggles towards a poetics of beauty and debris\, everything worth saving sung through gritted teeth. \n\n\n\nLuke Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in North Wales and the North of England. He is the author of many books and chapbooks of poetry\, including Beginning to End (Nightboat\, 2027)\, Home Radio (the87press\, 2021)\, and Glacial Decoys (Free Poetry\, 2021). His critical writing includes Living in History: Poetry in Britain\, 1945-1979 (Edinburgh University Press\, 2024)\, and Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (Palgrave\, 2017). As an editor\, he has contributed to a number of archival projects\, most recently: Quintets by Iliassa Sequin (Winter Editions\, 2026); Saborami: An Expanded Facsimile Edition by Cecilia Vicuña (Book Works\, 2024); and So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat\, 2023). With Amy Tobin he runs the small press Distance No Object. He lives in London. \n\n\n\nPRAISE FOR BAD OMENS: \n\n\n\n‘Reading Luke Roberts’ book\, a memory of having lunch with Etel Adnan\, in Boulder\, beneath a tree the colour of butterscotch\, returns. There’s a golden thread\, I sometimes think\, that links all poets.  Sometimes it drops on the floor\, sometimes we pick it up.  Sometimes we cut it in half with a pair of sewing scissors.  Sometimes it snags on a jagged landscape.  Sometimes we have to weave it from scratch.’– Bhanu Kapil\, author of How To Wash A Heart \n\n\n\n‘I often turn to Luke Roberts for ideas. So it’s reassuring to turn to him here and find him looking around too\, piecing things together\, pulling them up\, bringing something back into focus before it’s lost\, setting things side by side\, recovering days\, observing his attention without time’s now ineffective analysis. Keeping track is hard\, holding things together is hurting and confusing; I’ll keep turning to him for more. And while I’m here\, how excellent to have Book Works and Luke Roberts in the same place!’ – Holly Pester\, author of The Lodgers \n\n\n\n‘Bad Omens is difficult to characterise: part narrative; part lyric; part poetics; part elegy; part interpretation of dreams; part clowning around\, it constructs the form it requires. Luke Roberts addresses his wounds and ours with anger and grace\, constructing memorials to losses private and collective and\, in doing so\, reminding us of the total permeability of the boundaries between the two. I loved it.’ – Helen Charman\, author of Mother State \n\n\n\n‘Alongside everyone else\, I’m confounded by immiseration\, war\, and ecological crisis\, and somehow Bad Omens makes me glad to be in the world\, helps me to recognise what it means to be here\, through its sublime descriptions that never condescend to silver linings or the mere affects of transformation.’ – Nisha Ramayya\, author of States of the Body Produced by Love \n\n\n\n‘Seductively spiky\, witty and tender\, Bad Omens is a deeply affecting notation of the texture of life lived. It wrestles with and flourishes in difficulty\, spinning grief into a search for something like song. Luke Roberts’ prose is a trail that always leads back to the poem\, whose fragments stutter into chorus and whose ‘I’ draws a collective around itself.’ – Daisy Lafarge\, author of Paul   \n\n\n\nPlease note this is a free event but please do book ahead. You can also reserve a copy of the book ahead of the event. \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-luke-roberts-presents-bad-omens/ CATEGORIES:Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Poetry-Series-LUKE-ROBERTS.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260721T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260721T210000 DTSTAMP:20260617T150316Z CREATED:20260617T145610Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260617T150316Z UID:79607-1784660400-1784667600@housmans.com SUMMARY:HOUSMANS POETRY SERIES: JD HOWSE DESCRIPTION:It starts with the Buggery Act of 1533. Or perhaps the arrest of Eleanor Rykener. Or perhaps the execution of James Pratt and John Smith. The truism goes that queer people have always been here\, but for as long as there have been written records of us those records have dealt with our suppression\, criminalisation\, and punishment. How can we construct a sense of our own history when its wilful erasure has been violently enacted time and time again across the centuries?  \n\n\n\nComposed over a ten year period\, Noises Again is a hugely ambitious and staggeringly complex literary collage that blurs the lines between literature and visual art. Stringing together scraps of text from history books and pornographic novels\, newspaper clippings and love letters\, drunk sexts and court records\, JD Howse explores the buried\, obscure ephemera of gay history and returns with a text by turns violent\, tragic\, erotic\, and confounding. This is a truly singular book\, defying characterisation\, description\, and logic.  \n\n\n\nOUR POETS\n\n\n\nJD Howse is a writer who works across poetry\, prose\, and collage. His debut collection Just Meat Not God was published in 2022 and he has published a number of pamphlets and artist’s books. He has a BA in English and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway\, University of London\, and is the curator of Permeable Barrier.  \n\n\n\nAzad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and Editor at Philosophy and Global Affairs\, the CLR James Journal\, and The Hythe Review. He is a PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College\, University of London. He is the author of three poetry collections\, most recently\, Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books / Out-Spoken Press\, 2024) which was shortlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize. His second collection Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time (Broken Sleep Books\, 2022) was the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Guillén Award. In July 2025\, Azad was inaugurated as the Poet Laureate of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He lives in South London. \n\n\n\nCalliope Michail is a poet and translator\, currently undertaking a PhD at King’s College\, London. She is the Poetry Editor of Stillpoint Journal\, and her work has appeared in various publications. \n\n\n\nVJ René is the author of two pamphlets of poetry\, Scavengers (Salo Press\, 2021) and HYDRA (Marble Poetry\, 2020). Recent critical and creative works appear in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal\, Forum Journal and the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies.​ \n\n\n\nOliver Zarandi is a writer and filmmaker. His debut\, Soft Fruit In The Sun (Hexus Press)\, was described as being like ‘getting a hug from David Cronenberg.’ His follow-up\, Body Horror\, was shortlisted for the Prototype Prize in 2024. He is currently in development on his first film\, Skinny Boy. \n\n\n\nThis is a free event but please RSVP below. \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-poetry-series-jd-howse/ CATEGORIES:Literary Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://housmans.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Poetry-Series6.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR