‘Today the ideal home remains a site of illusory ease, a space that can be wiped clean of the residues of living…’

Join Libreria for our first event in 2023, as we welcome Sam Johnson-Schlee and Amy Key to discuss Sam’s radical and elegiac essay, Living Rooms, which invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.

Living Rooms blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world.

In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?

About the authors

Sam Johnson-Schlee is an academic and writer living by the sea in North Essex. He writes non-fiction and memoir about the politics and culture of everyday life. He is interested in how paying attention to familiar objects and practices can open up new perspectives on the world we live in. Living Rooms is his first book.

Amy Key is a poet and writer based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe (Salt, 2013) and Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe, 2018), which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman, Times and Irish Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in At The Pond (Daunt, 2019), Granta, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her first work of non-fiction, Arrangements in Blue, will be published by Jonathan Cape (UK) in Spring 2023, alongside publication in the US (Liveright) and Italy (Rizzoli).