We are BUZZING to be keeping off our 2026 Poetry Series with the brilliant Joseph Minden, who’ll be launching is latest collection Answerlands, published late last year by Carcanet. Joining Joseph we have Kat Addis, Joseph Persad, Dolly Rae Star and Verity Spott.
This is a free event, but please RSVP below. Also please feel free to BYOB.
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 Bennett
We 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?
As 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.
If 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.
Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.
Fan of a Romantic Period Drama? Can’t stand the stuff? Either way, we’ve got the event for you. Come and deconstruct Romance this Valentine’s Day with Housmans and Zoë McGee
We’ll be discussing
Zoë’s fabulous new work of Romantic Deconstruction: Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel.
What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.
Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.
Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.
In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway.
Zoë McGee has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and an MSt in eighteenth-century studies from the University of Oxford. She has spoken at conferences internationally and now performs at very nerdy stand-up comedy nights. Among other things, she has worked as a university teacher, a bookseller and a professional board-game-explainer. She owns too many books and is a competitive ballroom dancer in her spare time.
As 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.
If 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.
Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.
THE HISTORY OF SWITCHBOARD
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 shop for an evening of discussion and celebration.
‘A fantastic journey through an overlooked archive bursting with humanity and real life on every page.’ Dan Snow
In a crawlspace at the offices of Switchboard, a queer helpline in operation since 1974, lies dozens of log books kept by volunteers describing the phone calls they had taken: a teenager whose parents had kicked them out of their home for dressing as the wrong gender; a lesbian terrified of having her baby taken away from her; a man arrested for chatting up another man in a public toilet; a young person wanting to know how to come out. These logs were traces of tens of thousands of queer lives, a bridge to a past hidden from people like Tash Walker and Adam Zmith in their youth, captured by people who lent an ear to those in need. Walker and Zmith came of age in the time of Section 28, a law which banned councils and schools ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. In recovering these logs, they encountered people grappling with feelings, questions and problems both familiar and different. They set out to learn from – and sometimes speak to – people on both sides of the calls. Charged with joy, gossip, sensuality, heartbreak and sometimes fear, and with a potent relevancy to the world today, Walker and Zmith have collected these stories in The Log Books. They capture queer lives in stunning detail, embarking on a journey of both collective history and self -discovery, propelling it into the foreground of our national history.
‘Essential reading, grounded in the past while also explaining the urgency of LGBTQ+ politics today.’TOM RASMUSSEN, author of Diary of a Drag Queen
‘Hauntingly beautiful, this is a testament to the ongoing courage and care so profound in our community. I was enchanted at every page. Completely life – changing.’ DAN GLASS, author of Queer Footprints
OUR SPEAKERS:
Tash Walker is a writer, podcast producer and community organiser who has worked with institutions such as the Barbican, BBC, and Queer Britain; they were a member of Switchboard’s board for eight years.
Adam Zmith is a writer and multi-format producer; his book Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures won the Polari First Book Prize. He writes theatre shows, talks and podcasts, including Press Play Turn On which won Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards 2024.
As 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.
If 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.
Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.
Experimental trans neonoir fiction.
‘Jaw Filler instantly joins the canon of outlier literature: jaw-dropper, more like.’
– Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold
Housmans 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 trans. You don’t need a body at all.’
When Detective Sean Hastings is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality cult community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin, and bankrolled by a mysterious tech company, VSI.
Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor, VSI’s token QTPOC face, sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world. Meanwhile, Casey, Sean’s ex, hopes Releasing will cure their Long Plague. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears. And the plot twists.
A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?
PRAISE FOR JAW FILLER
‘It’s like The Sluts meets Double Indemnity but everyone is trans. I had an absolute blast.’
– Macy Rodman
‘With Jaw Filler, Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray offer a searing, noir-flavored lens into the world of terminally online guys and our insecurities, fantasies, and wild imaginations of ourselves and each other. I will be discussing this in therapy and billing Charlie and Maz for the expense.’
– James Tom
‘There’s something faintly Brazil about Jaw Filler: wilful and breakneck, self-aware yet never cynical, paranoiac but always coyly – unarguably – plausible. Calling it a pastiche would be stupid. To do so would overlook not only the ravenous delight Jaw Filler takes in the melange of its genre conventions, but also, more importantly, its surgical commitment to grounding a narrative in what I can only succinctly describe as genocide-reality. Murray & Markbreiter have achieved the extremely contemporary and impossible to falsify: true camp darkness.’
– Hesse K., author of Disquiet Drive
OUR SPEAKERS
Maz Murray is an artist who makes films, writing, performances and things. They had their first institutional solo show at Focal Point Gallery in 2024. He’s currently working on a collaborative performance, PLOT HOLE, developed while an awardee at Studio Voltaire.
Charlie Markbreiter is the author of Rapid Onset: Anti-Trans Culture and U.S. Imperial Decline (Bloomsbury, 2027) and Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella (2022). He is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.
So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power.
THIS IS A FREE EVENT. TICKETS CAN BE BOOKED HERE:
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/31891/jaw-filler-in-conversation-maz-murr…