AN ORAL HISTORY OF PUNK ROCK, SPIRITUALITY AND LIBERATION
We are super excited to welcome John Malkin over from California to talk about his incredible, and as far as we can tell, unique, book: Punk Spirit! We’ve had countless books about punk (not to mention zines) pass through Housmans over the year but none that quite approach the topic from this angle.

Punk Spirit! is an oral history that examines this movement from many unique perspectives, bringing together well-known and cutting-edge bands including Sex Pistols, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, The Ramones, Gang of Four, Pussy Riot, Crass, Talking Heads, Propagandhi, The Slits, Bad Religion, Shelter, Rebel Riot, Blackfire, and many others.

Punk Spirit! ventures into the emotional and personal experiences of punk artists and activists from around the world and highlights intelligent, thoughtful, and humorous discussions on liberation, spirituality, and living freely. They discuss a myriad of topics from creativity and anger to freedom from suffering and the ways that punk rock has opposed or embodied religious and moral tenets. Chapters dive deeply into a variety of interconnected realms of punk rock such as the subgenre of straight edge, Krishnacore and Taqwacore, evangelical punk concerts in southern California churches, illegal punk concerts in East German churches, anti-religious sentiment within punk rock, the vital connections between punk and self-expression, and the myriad ways punk rock has been combined with spiritual and religious traditions to illuminate ideas from science, atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other ways of being in the world.

And complete with a forward by one of our favorite writers, Penny Rimbaud! How could we have said no?!

John Malkin is a journalist, musician, activist, photographer and filmmaker. He is the author of Punk Revolution!: An Oral History of Punk Rock Politics and Activism , and his interviews and writings have been published in internationally including Adbusters, Punk Planet, Razorcake, Spirituality & Health, Z Magazine, Ode, In These Times, Sojourners, The Sun, Film International, Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Friends Journal, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, The Monterey Herald, and others. He lives in Santa Cruz, California with his wife and son.

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.

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’s Laurence Housman Collection by discussing how Housman’s sociopolitical values emerged during the Victorian period as he developed an artistic practice as an Aesthetic and Decadent illustrator. Housman was also a writer who would go on to contribute to Votes for Women (1908-18), a suffrage newspaper edited by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. He would later collaborate with his sister, the engraver Clemence Housman, to found the Suffrage Atelier, an artists’ collective. Using illustration as a form of social and political resistance, Housman designed An Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1911), a work that featured many women artists who would go on to forge professional careers, including Pamela Colman Smith.

Dr Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the professionalisation of women illustrators and cartoonists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the socio-political and cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Her research interests include women artists and designers, illustration and book studies, gender and sexuality, reform movements, dress histories, and graphic satire.

This is a free event, but please RSVP. Link below:

Policing the beats: Black music, racism and criminal injustice
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.

Lambros and Adèle will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by a q&a.

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.

A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons.

Join us for some radical thinking, some real radical autonomist thinking, with one of our favourite vanguardist publishers, Minor Compositions. Come and celebrate the publication of another vital, alert and mind bending work of theory.

A Studious Use invites readers to reconsider the habitual logics and material priorities at play in practices of both study and use. It examines their potential and actual interplay, unravelling the ways in which these are at once shaped by and reproductive of broader social, political, and cultural currents. Here Giovanni Marmont explores how a seemingly inoffensive commitment to the terms of individuation, as a manner of understanding and organising the world first and foremost as an aggregate of separate entities, carries with it profoundly harmful implications. With an eye toward the unseen possibilities of social life, he proposes an alternative mode of engagement with and through artefacts – studious use – predicated instead on our general, shared, practical indebtedness. Through a blend of theoretical critique, philosophical inquiry, and experimental design practices, A Studious Use offers a rethinking of sociality not as a coming together of independent, if interacting subjects and objects but, rather, as a primary, undirected, ongoing collective experiment.

Author of For a Pragmatics of the Useless,Erin Manning says: “How do practices dispossess us? How does use reorient the very question of function and form? Where else can it take us beyond our-selves? In this compelling engagement with use-beyond-use-value, Marmont takes us on a journey to a non-binary account of use that refuses the limited account of any marketable claim. Instead, it moves use toward the surprise of constellations as experimental as they are quotidian.”

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.

Activism, Racial Justice, and Human Rights from Below
Please note this an externally organised event. You can RSVP using this link:

https://www.easy-rsvp.com/G3uqJ0-book-launch-migration-and-mobile-rights

[Eroding Ed’s note: Fuck Roger Hallam, and boo to Housman’s for stroking his ego. We’d delete it but the event is on radar and our script will just import it again.]

Housmans welcome Roger Hallam to discuss his essential new book: Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act. From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam—farmer, researcher, and co-founder of Just Stop Oil—delivers a searing indictment of a legal system that punishes those who resist, while protecting those who destroy. In July 2024, Hallam was dragged from a British courtroom for refusing to stay silent about the climate crisis. For “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” he was sentenced to five years in prison—the harshest punishment for civil disobedience in the UK in modern British history. The case made front-page news and drew global outcry.

Suicide is part memoir, part political reckoning. Drawing on Hallam’s award-winning research and experience representing himself in four Crown Court trials, it lays bare the moral and legal failures of a society sleepwalking into catastrophe. From climate science and the right of necessity, to the collapse of democratic norms and the illusions of secular reason, this is a radical call to rethink justice, truth, and duty in the face of extinction.

Housmans are delighted to be hosting an event around this essential new book — a stalwart guide to strengthen the movement for freedom and equality for all.

Our society is breaking down. Fascists are winning elections, economic inequality is rampant, and the climate crisis is at its tipping point. It feels like the amount of work needed to overcome these injustices is too much to handle. But what if there is a way to lower the threshold to action? Who will free us if not ourselves?

In Radical Justice, international human rights lawyer Nani Jansen Reventlow shows how we can build a fundamentally different future with our own hands. We all have our own spheres of influence, and each of us can be the revolution.  

Taking inspiration from the deep well of anti-racist and social activist writers such as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Angela Davis, each chapter offers tips on how to learn, reflect and act in a society where we are told we are powerless. Including advice on strategic litigation, reclaiming our digital rights, reparations demands, climate activism and much more, the information in these pages is indispensable to the struggle for radical justice.

Nani Jansen Reventlow is an international human rights lawyer. She is the founder of Systemic Justice, which advocates for marginalised communities through strategic litigation. Politico named her one of society’s great visionary tech leaders for her work on digital human rights. She has also been honoured with awards from Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Universities.

Nani will read from and talk about the book for about 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A.

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.

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‘An urgent, vital contribution to the feminist conversation – one that tears through the comfortable myth of universal sisterhood’ – Alya Mooro, author of The Greater Freedom

Growing up, journalist Shahed Ezaydi was often asked how she could call herself a feminist and still practise her faith. It’s a question that reveals a deeper issue that Muslim women often face: being ignored in feminist spaces entirely, or cast as passive victims in need of being saved. This mindset fuels gendered Islamophobia and a narrow white feminism. But Muslim women don’t need rescuing.

The Othered Woman is the book Ezaydi wishes her younger self could have turned to. It challenges the myths of how Muslim women are oppressed and who by, and shows that these myths translate into very real harm both in Britain and around the world, showcasing the voices of intersectional feminists who are fighting for liberation on their own terms. Accessible and compelling, this is urgent reading for anyone who considers themselves a feminist.

And we are delighted that Ezaydi is able to join us at Housmans to discuss this essential book.

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.

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