Housmans

Upcoming events at Housmans

Housmans is a bookshop in King's Cross. Near Here currently lists 6 upcoming events, including BOOK LAUNCH: FLOYDS GONE by Jacob A. Smith, Housmans Poetry Series: James Byrne and HOUSMANS READING SERIES: Valerie Hsiung with Verity Spott, Andrea Brady and others.

Likely freeCommunity

BOOK LAUNCH: FLOYDS GONE by Jacob A. Smith

Come celebrate the launch of a brilliant and daring new short story collection published by eidolon ink Jacob A. Smith is launching his debut story collection, Floyds Gone, at Housmans Bookshop! Please join us on July 22nd to celebrate the release of his book. All author and publisher profits from the evening go to Medical Aid for Palestinians and Lifeshare. Free entry + doors open at 6:45pm “When you have them pixelated, magic occurs. You become the imagination of the technology. Like you’re watching the technology dream.” ‘A man plans to disappear after his partner becomes pregnant. Films play on loop in a countryside home filled with waste. A violent video appears on an online server where people plot and rate hoaxes. An employee stalks his boss to protect her from a threatening man. Pictures of a burning building are nominated for a major prize. An empty boat returns to shore and the photographer on board has disappeared. These are some of the unsettling, vivid images that accumulate throughout Floyds Gone, Jacob A. Smith’s debut story collection. Inhabiting the uncertain space between images, dreams and reality, Smith’s stories probe the strange data of our mediated lives. Built around moments of arrival, departure, and change, and a recurring name that may refer to more than one man, the stories of Floyds Gone are all powerful screenshots of life lived in a world of multiplying images and vanishing selfhood.’ Please note this is an externally organised event.

Wed 22 Jul19:45Housmans

via Housmans

Arts & Culture

Housmans Poetry Series: James Byrne

Join us for another evening of cutting edge poetry. For this instalment, we are delighted to welcome the legendary James Byrne to the shop to launch his latest collection The Banality of Power (Broken Sleep Books, 2026) Joining him we have the incredible Ziba Karbassi and are delight to welcome back long time friend of Housmans Stephen Watts. Our Poets: Ziba Karbassi—born in Tabriz, northwestern Iran in 1969—began writing poems from an early age. Her first book in Persian was published in her twenties and, since then, she has published regularly, with more than twelve books now available, both in her mother tongue and internationally. Forced to leave Iran in the early 1980s with her mother and younger sisters, she has since lived most of her life in London. She is widely regarded as one of the leading poets currently writing in Persian and, to date, her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Karbassi’s densely revolutionary lyrical writing achieves an intensity of space that is almost unique in contemporary poetry, melting the valencies of breath into the depths of meaning. She has performed her work widely across Europe and America.

Thu 23 Jul20:00Housmans

via Housmans

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Community

HOUSMANS READING SERIES: Valerie Hsiung with Verity Spott, Andrea Brady and others

We are delighted to welcome the incredible Valerie Hsiung to Housmans, visiting us from the mountains of Colorado in USA. Joining her we have some of the finest poets working in Britain today. We will be celebrating Valerie’s latest book, The pedestrian: a poet’s novel, a body, a house, where childhood ungrieved meets the horror of displacement. Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself. PRAISE: Why are some people’s pores open in their aloneness? Valerie Hsiung asks, in this, the most—maybe only—honest biography I’ve ever read. Is it a biography? It is the consequence of a porousness (i.e. of being perforated) that seems to be the consequence, in turn, of being made to live the impossible state of perpetual estrangement as self-enchantment, the impermanent state of metamorphosis as permanence.

Sat 1 Aug20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Arts & CultureLive Music

Poetry Reading: Ellen Renton Launches 'you And Yours'

Join us for an evening of poetry to mark the launch of Ellen Renton’s new pamphlet. You and Yours: Swinging across timelines and from the mundane to the surreal, You and Yours is a study in grief: how it exists beyond seismic losses in the stories we inherit, in shifting friendships, and in uncertain landscapes. These poems celebrate the self as a malleable entity under the influence of all the lives it encounters, and balance the pain that characterises the loss of a profound connection with the wonder of having it in the first place. About Ellen Renton: Ellen Renton is a writer from Edinburgh. Her work has been published in journals including Poetry London, Gutter, and Magma, and she released her debut pamphlet An Eye For An Eye For An Eye with Stewed Rhubarb Press. Her work in theatre has included the one-woman show Within Sight (2020), Disciples (2023), and PALS (in development in 2026). She has released an EP and the album My Noise is Nothing with electronic musician Lord of the Isles. She holds an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry from the University of East Anglia. Please note this is an externally organised event. Any inquires should be made to: TICKETS: Share this: Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Insta (Opens in new window) Insta Like this:Like Loading…

Fri 7 Aug19:30Housmans

via Housmans

Talks & Lectures

'flamboyance' With Jack Parlett In Conversation With Peter Scalpello

JACK PARLETT AND CELEBRATED POET PETER SCALPELLO DISCUSS ‘FLAMBOYANCE’ AND HOW IT IGNITES EVERY ASPECT OF OUR LIVES, FROM ART AND ENTERTAINMENT TO RITUAL AND PROTEST. Flamboyance is Jack Parlett’s follow up to his acclaimed Fire Island (A Housmans bestseller of 2022). This new book has all the qualities one has come to expect of Jack’s work; big hearted and erudite in equal measure. Flamboyance ignites every aspect of our lives, from art and entertainment to ritual and protest. The word conjures exuberance and unashamed passion; in thought, expression and dress. Yet historically the term ‘flamboyant’ has been reserved for the over-the-top and the outré, invoked at times as a pejorative innuendo or worse. In his fascinating new book, Jack Parlett argues for its value as an empowering and creative force, illuminating the ways in which flamboyance is a fundamental aspect of human conduct that both marks and transcends difference. Taking in an eclectic array of examples, from Gothic architecture to the orange flowers of Dungeness, and populated by figures such as Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan, this is a book about flamboyant art and the art of flamboyance. And having both aspired to it and rejected it, Jack recounts his personal relationship to flamboyance while also finding new meanings of the word, exploring its surprises and contradictions, and reconnecting with its radical power.

Tue 18 Aug20:00Housmans

via Housmans

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Community

Book Launch: Liquid Reflections with Liliane Lijn

We are profoundly honored to be hosting the paperback launch for a memoir by one the world’s greatest living artists, the sculptor Liliane Lijn, who will be joined in conversation by leading art writer Jennifer Higgie. 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 May 2nd to launch the paperback edition of her brilliant bildungsroman Liquid Reflections. The book begins in 1958 with the talented and fearless Liliane Lijn leaving her family home and moving to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement.

Fri 4 Sept20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Event details on Near Here are aggregated from third-party sources and may change. Always verify times, location, availability, and any price directly with the organiser before travelling. See Terms.