Reading list

New Year, New Books! | Take 60% off select titles

60% off select titles until February 4th @ 11:59p ET! Add three or more titles from this list to your cart and the discount automatically extends to any Verso book on our site!

19 January 2024

New Year, New Books! | Take 60% off select titles

Enjoy 60% off the titles below!

In for 2024:

Building solidarity across movements
Deepening your understanding of sociality history and politics
Supporting radical independent publishing

Out for 2024:

Avoiding reading theory (it’s time.)
Falling for the trappings of liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism.
Converting revolutionary leaders into ‘harmless icons’ after their deaths, while robbing their arguments of substance and blunting their revolutionary edge.

60% discount applies to the titles/editions listed on this page. Add any three books from this list to your cart and the 60% discount will extend to any Verso title site-wide and will be applied at checkout, up to three per order.

Sale ends February 4 @ 11:59p ET.

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Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner 2024

by Verso Books UK

The 2024 Verso Radical Diary is a week-to-view planner for keeping track of the year ahead. Alongside illustrations and book excerpts, it features significant radical dates from throughout history—...

The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefr...

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...

Verso V Notebook

by Verso Books UK

Celebrate your favourite radical publishing house with our official branded merch! The Verso V Notebook beautfully celebrates our logo, is fully lined in the signature Verso red and in a handy port...

What Is Antiracism?

by Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...

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...

Capitalism

by Nancy Fraser

Capitalism, by the twenty-first century, has brought us an era of escalating, overlapping crisis - ecological, political, social - which we may not survive. In this brilliant, wide-ranging conversa...

Health Communism

by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing th...

A People's History of the World

by Chris Harman

In this monumental book, Chris Harman achieves the impossible—a gripping history of the planet from the perspective of the struggling people throughout the ages.From earliest human society to the H...

Everything and Less

by Mark McGurl

As the story goes: Jeff Bezos left a lucrative job to start something new in Seattle only after a deeply affecting reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. But if a novel gave usAmazon.com, ...

An Event, Perhaps

by Peter Salmon

Who was Jacques Derrida? For some, he is responsible, at least in part, for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic cri...

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

by Katherine Angel

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And m...

Toussaint Louverture

by C.L.R. James

Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

The end of slavery started in what was then San Domingo. In 1791, the enslaved people of the most prized French sugar plantation colony revolted against their masters. For over twelve years, agains...

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...

Who Will Build the Ark?

Edited by Benjamin Kunkel and Lola Seaton

In Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key di...

The Case for the Green New Deal

by Ann Pettifor

In 2008, the first Green New Deal was devised by Pettifor and a group of English economist and thinkers, but was ignored within the tumults of the financial crash. A decade later, the ideas was rev...

Girl Online

by Joanna Walsh

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to a...

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...

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

by Stuart Jeffries

But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and cont...

The Invention of Sicily

by Jamie Mackay

Sicily is at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, and for over 2000 years has been the gateway between Europe, Africa and the East. It has long been seen as the frontier between Western Civilizatio...

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...

Towards a Green Democratic Revolution

by Chantal Mouffe

In recent years, the promises of the populist moment have faltered, as seen in the defeats of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Melenchon. In addition, the pandemic has brought about a strong...

Precarious Life

by Judith Butler

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper un...

Hegemony Now

by Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams

Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?We cannot change anything until we have a better unders...

Against Borders

by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha

Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveilla...

Work Without the Worker

by Philip Jones

We are told that the future of work will be increasingly automated. Algorithms, processing massive amounts of information at startling speed, will lead us to a new world of effortless labour and a ...

Modern Times

by Jacques Rancière

In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in mo...

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” In recent decades,...

Democracy in the Political Present

by Isabell Lorey

‘Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.’I...

Writers and Missionaries

by Adam Shatz

Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz asks: do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remai...

Taking A Long Look

by Vivian Gornick

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and pe...

The Return of the Political

by Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffe is one of the most influential political theorists at work today. Her work has influenced political parties across Europe and continues to inform the direction of left politics. In t...

The State of Capitalism

by The EReNSEP Writing Collective and Costas Lapavitsas

The health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has c...

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies

by Leslie Kern

What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the mo...

Communism and Strategy

by Isabelle Garo

If the question of communism is making a comeback today, this renewed interest is often accompanied by an abandonment of any concrete political perspective. Critical philosophies are flourishing an...

Osip Mandelstam

by Ralph Dutli

This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolution...

Scorched Earth

by Jonathan Crary

Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for NonfictionIn this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality...

Speak Out!

by Brixton Black Women's Group

Introduction by Jade Bentil

Edited by Milo Miller

"We came to Britain in search of better opportunities or to get some of the wealth which had been misappropriated from the Caribbean, but what in reality did we find?"Speak Out brings together the ...

Natopolitanism

Edited by Grey Anderson

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fortunes of NATO - pronounced "braindead" only a few years prior - have been miraculously revived. The alliance, buoyed by surging European military b...

Britain's Empire

by Richard Gott

As the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain’s Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative ...

Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse...

Potential History

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay ...

The Verso Book of Feminism

Edited by Jessie Kindig

Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women’s bodies and women’s lives. People—of any and no gender—have pro...

Mistaken Identity

by Asad Haider

Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history’s most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common grou...

Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

In this landmark book, Alexander Zevin looks at the development of modern liberalism by examining the long history of the Economist newspaper, which, since 1843, has been the most tireless – and in...

Red List

by David Caute

In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is known chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who endanger national security—from Nazi fifth column...

Red Friends

by John Sexton

China's resistance to Imperial Japan was the other great internationalist cause of the 'red 1930s', along with the Spanish Civil War. These desperate and bloody struggles were personified in the li...

China in One Village

by Liang Hong

After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province....

The Apocalypse and the End of History

by Suzanne Schneider

In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the r...

Space Forces

by Fred Scharmen

Many societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there - whether conquering the unknown, establishing space "colonies," privatising the moon's resources -...

Elegy for Mary Turner

by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly det...

Red Valkyries

by Kristen Ghodsee

Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...

Radius

by Yasmin El-Rifae

In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace. This is the sto...

Alt-America

by David Neiwert

Just as Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterio...

Travellers of the World Revolution

by Brigitte Studer

The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of thi...

Gandhi's Assassin

by Dhirendra Jha

Dhirendra Jha's deeply researched history places Nathuram Godse's life as the juncture of the dangerous fault lines in contemporary India: the quest for independence and the rise of Hindu nationali...

Making the Revolution Global

by Theo Williams

Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...

Imitation Democracy

by Dmitrii Furman

Afterword by Tony Wood

Foreword by Keith Gessen

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of “imitation democracy,” marked by “a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles ...

Not by Omission

by Amnon Kapeliouk

Introduction by Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier

In this book, first published in Hebrew in 1975 and now available in English for the first time with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Amnon Kapeliouk traces the policies and attitudes that led to t...

We're Here Because You Were There

by Ian Sanjay Patel

What are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a se...