Verso Books Gift Guide
Books to ignite revolutionary possibilities: all 40% (print) and 60% (ebook) off until the of the year.
End all your gift-buying woes with our gift guide! We have book suggestions for all the comrades in your life, from hard-to-buy-for theory fans to those who want to know exactly why it's time to abolish the police. You will find reading on automation and the future of work, abolition and empire, and powerful histories of resistance and protest. Share, with your loved ones, radical and visionary ideas that interrogate existing thinking, help make sense of the mess we find ourselves in, and re-imagine a world after capitalism.
Don't forget, we have bundled ebooks with every print purchase (where available) — meaning you can gift the print book (if you want to!) and start reading the ebook straight away!
We have 40% off ALL our print books and 60% off ALL our ebooks until January 4th, 23:59 EST. See more information here and our end of year highlights.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]Calling all comrades! In our 50th year we are delighted to bring you this Verso canvas bag–big enough to carry around Lefebvre's 900-page Critique of Everyday Life, and sturdy enough to stash a milkshake.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]The 2021 Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner is a beautifully designed week-to-view planner where you can keep track of your coming year. Alongside illustrations, it features significant dates in radical history, drawn from events such as the English Civil War and Castro's victory march in Havana, and touches on the lives of characters such as Rosa Luxemburg and Gil Scott Heron, and includes movements such as #blacklivesmatter and the Suffragettes.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]To accompany our Radical Diary, we now have this beautiful new Verso notebook. Inspired by the original covers of New Left Books, this notebook is fully lined in signature Verso red and based on our bestselling Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]A consensus-shattering account of automation technologies and their effect on workplaces and the labor market.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]Philosopher, film star, father of “post truth”—the real story of Jacques Derrida.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]“It’s 1992 and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen.”
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo, a coven of witches begins cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. Awful things happen in aspic.
Jenny Hval’s latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, gender and art.
Need more convincing? Read Sukhdev Sandhu's review in the Guardian.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]An unprecedented collection of feminist voices from four millennia of global history.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]How the police endanger us and why we need to find an alternative.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]A masterly history of the North-South divide, from the formation of an English state rooted in London and the south-east; the Industrial Revolution and the rise of provincial trade unions and the Labour party; the dashed hopes for regional economic renewal in the post-war years; the sharply contrasting fates of northern manufacturing and the City of London under Thatcher and New Labour; to the continuing repercussions of financial crisis and austerity.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]*says The New York Times! (we agree)
A tartly hilarious and deeply affecting new novel from the best-selling author of Will and Testament.
This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]Who owns London? Alpha City moves from gated communities and the mega-houses of the super-rich to the disturbing rise of evictions and displacements from the city. It shows how the consequences of widening inequality have an impact on the urban landscape.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, the book makes clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field.
[book-strip index="17" style="buy"]Jameson’s first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin’s work.
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from Angela Davis has lost none of its prescience or power.
[book-strip index="19" style="buy"]A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties.
[book-strip index="20" style="buy"]“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project.
Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author.
In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto—raging and wanting, quarreling and provoking—has always played a central role in feminism, and it’s the angry, brash feminism we need now. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action.
[book-strip index="22" style="buy"]In The Corona Crash, leading economics commentator Grace Blakeley theorises about the epoch-making changes that the coronavirus brings in its wake.
[book-strip index="23" style="buy"]Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.
[book-strip index="24" style="buy"]Glitch Feminism is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilises and survives. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.
[book-strip index="25" style="buy"]How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it?
Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated the Earth. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
[book-strip index="26" style="buy"]Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.
[book-strip index="27" style="buy"]Decades of violence and chaos have generated a political and intellectual hysteria—ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about invading or hectically breeding Muslim hordes—that has affected even the most intelligent in Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines this hysteria and its fantasists, taking on its arguments and the atmosphere in which it has festered and become influential.
Bland Fanatics is not available from Verso in the United States and Canada (sorry!).
Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in one complete volume, presented in this beautiful edition.
[book-strip index="29" style="buy"]In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.
[book-strip index="30" style="buy"]John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists.
[book-strip index="31" style="buy"]What makes a fascist? The Authoritarian Personality is not only one of the most significant works of social psychology ever written, it also marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, showing him grappling with the problem of fascism and the reasons for Europe’s turn to reaction.
[book-strip index="32" style="buy"]A classic of twentieth-century thought, Minima Moralia is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.
[book-strip index="33" style="buy"]An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis by Walter Rodney, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis.
[book-strip index="34" style="buy"]For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume—finally bringing together his guides to volumes I, II and much of III—presents this depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original, and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.
[book-strip index="35" style="buy"]Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist.
[book-strip index="36" style="buy"]The Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting their day-to-day struggles, their experiences of education, work and health care, and the personal and political struggles they have waged to preserve a sense of identity and community. First published in 1985 and winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize that year, The Heart of the Race is a testimony to the collective experience of black women in Britain, and their relationship to the British state throughout its long history of slavery, empire and colonialism.
[book-strip index="37" style="buy"]What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing.
[book-strip index="38" style="buy"]Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.
[book-strip index="39" style="buy"]In The Origin of Capitalism, a classic work of history and republished in this new edition, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state.
