Radical Happiness: A Reading List

In an era of increasing individualism and compounding crises, misery is abundant. But coming together in moments of collective fear and despair to work on common ground can enable moments of collective joy, even with quite small victories. 

We call for a radical happiness. A happiness rooted in collective joy that celebrates interdependence, care for the natural world, and bringing the good life to all. 

Get up to 50% off all these books in our End of Year Sale. Browse all our reading lists here.

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...

Lean on Me

by Lynne Segal

Have you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades?Questions of care, intimacy, educatio...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Working Girl

by Sophia Giovannitti

Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodificati...

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...

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...

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 ...

The Care Manifesto

by The Care Collective

The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where careless...

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...

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...

Mutual Aid

by Dean Spade

Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal imm...

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...

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