Fall Fiction
Fall is finally here, the season of reading novels in front of fireplaces (or creaky radiators).
Selected Verso fiction is on sale for 50% off (in North American only) until Wednesday, October 30 at 11:59PM EST.
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
“Will and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence.” – Paris Review
See the New Yorker article: "The Norwegian novel that divided a family and captivated a country."
Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time.
“Many have deemed Kurniawan the next Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an acclaimed pioneer of socialist realism.” – New Yorker
“These stories are blasphemous, perverse, and shocking! But so are you, if you’re a human being. With exceptional fervor, wit, and bite, Kurniawan faces the truth." – James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods
A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery.
“Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together.” –Guardian
A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. The inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heartbreaking revelation.
“A supernatural tale of murder and desire fascinatingly subverts the crime genre… Kurniawan’s writing demonstrates an affinity with literary heavyweights such as, yes, García Márquez and Dostoevsky.” –Guardian
The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project.
“Much praise is due to the editors for bringing together a newly translated collection of his short fictions, The Storyteller, in which he shows our iniquitous material world suffused and sabotaged by the uncanny like no one else.” – Jacqueline Rose
An explosive novel of Italy’s revolutionary 1969 by leading Italian novelist.
“We would do well to study how it was that Balestrini made politics and fiction and art, all in once place...one of the most compelling pieces of literature of the entire second half of the twentieth century.” – Rachel Kushner, New Yorker
A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic.
“This is like the stream of consciousness of our planet’s unraveling lifeworld, as channeled through its melting ice and a cruise ship naturalist in love with his doomed subject. Quick, dense, jagged, beautiful.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy
The story of a family whose life mirrors the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
“Tariq Ali constructs a stunning fresco, remarkable in its lucidity … A subtle novel in which history reveals its inner side with a moving modesty.” – Le Monde
A lost literary classic, written in 1894, The Viceroys is one of the most acclaimed masterworks of Italian realism.
“A unique combination of naturalistic lucidity over the fate of impoverished aristocracies, and a Goya-like inventiveness in extracting from social disintegration a whole gallery of grotesques and monstrosities … a superb lesson in how coarse and rancid the collapse of a ruling class actually is.” – Franco Moretti
A brilliant novel about memory, love, and the clash between the old world and the new, set in 1950s Spain.
“One of the most respected, gifted and prolific British historians of Spain.” – Guardian
In spare but vivid prose, The Unseen follows Autonomy’s trajectory through the eyes of a single working-class protagonist—from high-school rebellion, squatting and attempts to set up a free radio station to arrest and the brutalities of imprisonment. This is a powerful and gripping novel: a rare evocation of the intensity of commitment, the passion of politics.
A beautifully imagined story of love and resistance, by one of the foremost novelists of our age.
“John Berger has given us an exquisite thing. This is a book of controlled rage sculpted with tools of tenderness and a searing political vision.” – Arundhati Roy
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 women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset?
“A hilarious and inventive office-drone odyssey.” – Bookforum
