Housmans Bookshop

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...

We are very, very, very exited to be welcoming the dazzling provocateur, artist and all-round London legend STEWART HOME back to Housmans to talk about his latest book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness, a dazzling exposé on the violent politics and occultic fascism that underpins much of the history of contemporary yoga. As ever, Stewart Home sh...

Housmans are delighted to be welcoming Laura C. Forster and Joel White to the shop for a dicussion of their wonderful, exhilarting book on the radical potential of friendship! Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system.  Friends in Common  explores friendship as a radical practice, capable of upending hierarchies and producing social cha...

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities – and one that has a deeper history than you might think. We are delighted to welcome Professor Dan Hicks back to Housmans to discuss his incredible new book  Every Monument W...

‘It was exciting when it started, then comfortable and domestic, and over time we grew apart. If it had been real, our relationship wouldn’t have made a chapter in a memoir. But Mark was a fictional character, contrived by the British state to violate me and undermine the values I held dearest. And the entire time, EN31 was sitting around the corner, writing it all down, watching our lives unfold....

Alex Bollen  is a Postnatal Practitioner with the National Childbirth Trust and researcher with over 20 years of experiance, in  Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths  she picks apart the pernicious histories of what she refers to as ‘Good Mother Myths.’ These myths are deployed to censure mothers and blame them for society’s problems. Incensed by the way bad science is u...

Squatting in London has a rich and diverse history. Today, squatters live a marginalised, stigmatised and criminalised existence, yet they persist. Behind the glittering façade of shiny new buildings, London is a network of vacant offices, boarded-up shops and dilapidated pubs that host some of the city’s poorest and most determined citizens, exiled and increasingly pushed to the margins. We are v...