Housmans Bookshop

To help celebrate the launch of Russell Warfield‘s excellent new book The Green Socialist: Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future (Pluto, 2026) we invite into a good natured debate with fellow socialist writer Jonas Patrick Marvin, regular contributor to Salvage and author of The Breaking of the English Working Class (Verso, 2026).In The Green Socialist, Russel argues that the election...

WE ARE DELIGHTED TO WELCOME TANSY E. HOSKINS TO HOUMANS TO TALK ABOUT HER GROUNDBREAKING, MOVING NEW STUDY OF CHARITY SHOPS AND THE ROLES THEY PLAY IN MODERN CONSUMERIST CULTURE.‘Charity shops are ubiquitous and invisible. They anchor the high street, employ thousands, process millions of items. Yet far more is written about AI than this staple of 21st century Britain. Thank goodness, then, for Ta...

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 September 4th to launch the paperback edition of her brilliant bildungsroma...

Housmans are beyond honoured, and slightly delightedly flabbergasted, to welcome the legendary writer Robert Glück to the shop for a reading. Robert, or Bob, is one of the most important writers working in the world today, in a career that spans many decades, poetry and cutting edge fiction; his work has been of profound importance to the contemporary queer literary landscape.

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 SinclairBorn in 1930 into a privileged South African family, Robin Farquharson was part of a new wave of intellectuals...

A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. This is a work of breathtaking scholarship. We are delighted to welcome its author, Benjamin A Saltzman, to Housmans for its UK launch. He will be in conversation with Revd Dr Ayla Lepine. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads i...

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, Pl...

Kate Bayliss in conversation with Adrienne BullerPRIVATISING HUMANITY is a powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets. We 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...

‘PART WAKE-UP CALL, PART FINANCIAL THRILLER’ (SHAMI CHAKRABARTI) The Asset Class is an equal parts thrilling and enraging work of vital financial journalism, lifting the lid on the relentlessly destructive force of private equity. We are thrilled to welcome the book’s author Hettie O’Brien to Housmans to be interviewed about the book by celebrated journalist Dan Hancox. A thrilling, eye-opening in...

Please note that this talk was delivered with the assistance of a translator. Join for a discussion of the journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz. He spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. He was born in 1962 in Bozüyük, an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas. According to Yeni Özgür Politika, his political consciousness was shaped by his older brother, Hüseyin P...

Learn about Housmans’ namesake and his efforts to fight for women’s suffrage. This free talk is in collaboration UCL, who hold the Laurence Housman archive. Personal items of Housman’s taken from the archive will be on display. This public lecture will explore Housmans Bookshop namesake Laurence Housman (1865-1958) and his active role in the women’s suffrage movement. It will shed new light on UCL...

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Lambros Fatsis to Housmans to discuss the criminalizing of black culture, music and youth. We are thrilled also to welcome back the brilliant Adèle Oliver, author of ‘Deeping it: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill’, to interview Lambros about his work. Policing The Beats is a bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The...

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 UniversityWe welcome back the brill...

‘Linda Pentz Gunter has done a great service in highlighting the nuclear chain reaction and exposing the huge human and environmental costs. We need this book for our environment and a peaceful world’– Jeremy CorbynWe are delighted to welcome Linda Pentz Gunter to Housmans to discuss her new book No To Nuclear. Brilliantly written, clear, concise and exacting, this brilliant book shows us that the...

‘Hazel Sheffield’s book is a warming remedy to the creeping nihilism many feel about the places where they live,’ Jen CallejaWe 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 Bri...

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 BennettWe 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 yea...

An intimate history of LGBTQ+ life over four decades, discovered in a stash of forgotten, handwritten notes. Switchboard was founded at Housmans, and operated out of our premises for many years. So we are honored to start LGBT+ History Month by launching a book that covers an intimate part of Switchboard’s proud history and we look forward to welcoming its authors Tash Walker and Adam Zmith to the...

For our first event of the year we welcome Proffessor Katrina Navickas to the shop to discuss what is an increasingly urgent political issue in our current cultural climate. Her recent book, Contested Commons is a radical history of the increasing restrictions against protest in England’s public spaces. The work is a gripping overview of increasingly restrictive policing and legislation against pr...

Experimental trans neonoir fiction.‘Jaw Filler instantly joins the canon of outlier literature: jaw-dropper, more like.’– Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat GoldHousmans 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...

‘Sea Now joins Meijer’s rich oeuvre of novels and philosophical meditations on multispecies coexistence. One could read this novel as the story of two characters—the Netherlands and the sea—posing a question of each other: What am I? What and who is “the Netherlands”? What and who is “the sea”? The first question implicates uncomfortable stories of value: Who determines the status quo that decides...

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...

Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital Ecologies (Pluto Press) traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry. CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Frien...

ABOUT THE BOOKS:Danny Hayward‘s Training Exercises:‘Organized violence committed on ordinary speech’ is therapy for those who don’t believe in literature as value. Training Exercises is an unpacking of that dictum: seven short essays, letters, reports and anti-biographies written to overcome the feeling of resistance to the defacement of what strikes us as true. An anti-purge written out by lipsti...

‘Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy achieves the impossible: while it follows a clear line of interpretation – analytic philosophy is not politically neutral, it is deeply rooted in capitalist liberalism and its struggle against Leftist engagement -, it develops this line in a vast and complex narrative full of fascinating historical and personal details, from the Cambri...

Simon Hall and Owen Hatherley will be joining us to discuss Simon’s fascinating new book, THREE REVOLUTIONS: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys That Changed The World. From the streets of Petrograd during the heady autumn of 1917, to Mao’s stunning victory in October 1949, and Fidel’s triumphant arrival in Havana, in January 1959, the history of the twentieth century was transformed in dram...