Radical Happiness: A Reading List

Book strip #1

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  Radical Happiness

  by Lynne Segal

  Why are we so obsessed by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost? In an age of increasing individualis...
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  Lean on Me

  by Lynne Segal

  Questions of care, intimacy, education, meaningful work, and social engagement lie at the core of our ability to understand the world and its possibilities for human flourishing. In Lean On Me femi...
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  After Work

  by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek

  Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleanin...
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  They Call It Love

  by Alva Gotby

  They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the femi...
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  Fighting in a World on Fire

  by Andreas Malm

  Young people are inheriting a world of climate catastrophe. Young people are also one of the strongest forces leading movements for climate justice, and to halt the fossil fuel emissions that are m...
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  Miss Major Speaks

  by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek

  Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the H...
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  Set Fear on Fire

  by LASTESIS

  After the feminist art collective LASTESIS created their performance "A Rapist in Your Path" in their native Chile, it went viral across the globe, becoming the anthem of the grassroots feminist mo...
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  Working Girl

  by Sophia Giovannitti

  Working Girl explores the worlds of sex and art, asking what happens when both become subordinate to the marketplace. In this searching and provocative inquiry, Sophia Giovannitti describes her own...
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  Quick Fixes

  by Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong

  This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the boar...
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  Love and Money, Sex and Death

  by McKenzie Wark

  After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relati...
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  Happy Hour

  by Marlowe Granados

  With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York CityRefreshing and wry in ...
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  The Care Manifesto

  by The Care Collective

  The Care Manifesto is the fiercely argued demand to place care at the centre of our politics. Our lives are always interdependent. It is by nurturing these ties that we cultivate a world in which e...
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  The Care Crisis

  by Emma Dowling

  Every one of us will need care at some point in life: social care, healthcare, childcare, eldercare. In the shadow of COVID-19, care has become the most urgent topic of our times. But our care syst...
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  Overtime

  by Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge

  Overtime is about the politics of time, and specifically the amount of time that we spend labouring within capitalist society. It argues that reactivating the longstanding demand for shorter workin...
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  Mutual Aid

  by Dean Spade

  Mutual Aid is a radical handbook for anyone who grasps the severity of the global poly-crisis and wants a community-based means to fight back. Dean Spade — lawyer, academic, writer, and activist — ...
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  Utopia

  by Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas More

  Introduction by China Miéville

  Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More’s Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and...