Housmans Bookshop

Police the Beats: Lambros Fatsis w/ Adèle Oliver

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 emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first nor the only Black music to be targeted this way.Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.This original and readable book offers the first in-depth account of the policing of Black music in Britain, highlighting the relationship between politics, culture and criminal (in)justice and inviting music lovers, scholars and activists to tune in.

Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century: Laurent de Sutter in conversation with Alfie Bown

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 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.

NO TO NUCLEAR! Linda Pentz Gunter in conversation with Jonathon Porritt

‘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 there is no silver bullet for the climate crisis—but that hasn’t stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.No To Nuclear calls the industry’s bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of the US-based non-profit Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Previously, she was a journalist at USA Network, Reuters, and The Times. She launched, and writes for Beyond Nuclear’s online magazine, Beyond Nuclear International.Joining Linda in conversation we welcome the environmentalist and writer Johnathon Porritt. Jonathon is a great advocate for the Green Party and frequently contributes to magazines, newspapers and books, and appears on radio and television.‘Linda Pentz Gunter has the great skill that more writers should have: to take a crucial and complex issue and make it truly accessible. This rigorous and comprehensive work is a gift to everyone who wants to understand the nuclear power paradox’– Kate Hudson, previous General Secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Frontierlands by Hazel Sheffield w/ Nadia Idle

‘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 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 changeNadia 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.

May We Feed the King: Writing Radical Fiction Today w/ Rebecca Perry & Misha Honcharenko

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 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?