2025 Verso Staff Picks

Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

John B Calhoun was an American scientist hired by the American Institute of Mental Health to study the effects of overcrowding on rats. In a vast barn he devised increasingly elaborate 'cities' to show the impact of different types of housing on the rodents, and he drew immensely influential conclusions about the relationship between behaviour, living conditions and the built environment, with often horrific consequences. His studies were later used to attack modern types of architecture and city building, in particular social housing. It is a fascinating story of how dubious science is often used in order to bolster the worst kind of political judgement.

Leo

The Fawn by Magda Szabó

Airing one’s grievances can be a dubious motivation for art, especially considering the never ending online slew of contemptuous hot takes. Yet Szabó, like everyone’s favorite, Thomas Bernhard, has a particularly compelling deployment of humor, honesty and stylistic innovation, avoiding the covert self-congratulation of those authors less skilled in the Great Art of Being a Hater. In The Fawn, Eszter, a successful actress in Communist Hungary, tells her life story by way of a confessional letter. Addressed to a “you” that is quickly revealed to be a lover, the book hops between the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (Szabó trusts the reader enough to piece it together), where Eszter’s disdain for her childhood friend, the pretty, polite and well-to-do Angéla serves as both the spark of Eszter’s personal ambition and the symbol for all the world’s hardships. Set during the Second World War and Hungary’s Communist turn, Eszter’s experience of her family’s fall from bourgeois privilege and subsequent fame as an actress in Rákosi’s Hungary ground this All About Eve situation in the political turmoil of mid-century Budapest.

Gillian

Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory by Phil Neel

I’ve been reading the second book from communist geographer Phil Neel. Building on ideas from his much beloved Hinterland, this is a larger book; both in its literal size (around 800 pages) and its scope (it includes case studies from China, Thailand, Sudan, and Tanzania.) In Hellworld, Neel is getting to grips with the current arrangement of capitalist production as it mutates the composition of planet earth, this means looking at different sites of production and their place in global value chains to map out what he refers to as the material community of capital (a term borrowed from Jacques Camatte.) Despite its ambition and depth, Hellworld is very readable. Unfortunately, copies are quite hard to get hold of for the time being, so you might do better to request it at your local library. 

Sam

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This is a beautifully written book about the practical challenges we face in disability organising. It digs into the messy, joyful, hard work of taking care of each other as we face disability, madness, loneliness, and a lack of accessibility without burning ourselves out. One of my favourite quotes: “I believe our beloved dead want us to do more than life on one cracker and an inaccessible building, forever.”

Anjali

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

The best book on China this year. Wang conceives of China as an "engineering state" that builds big at breakneck speeds. China puts up railways, bridges, and factories at a speed that no other country can match. But China’s government extends its engineering logic beyond physical infrastructure and unleashes social engineering onto its population. Wang's chapter on the One-China Policy reveals the dangers of treating a population as if it can be molded as easily as concrete. WIth no regard for civil liberties, the engineering state unleashed a thirty-six-year campaign of mass sterilization, forced abortions, and infanticide. The “engineering state” is such a useful concept because it simultaneously captures both the admirable and the abominable in China — the marvelous growth that’s pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty and the invasive authoritarianism that forces mass abortions and locks up labor organizers. Breakneck is the rare book that can ask the big questions about the massive, diverse country that is China without devolving into one-sided banalities.

Daniel

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

The Factory follows three different narrators through their increasingly absurd days working at an industrial factory that constitutes and consumes its surrounding town. Monotony meets the eerie as Oyamada writes of circular tasks and the timeblur of fluorescent lighting. If you haven't felt exploited lately (congrats!) or want some listless company inside the psyche of the modern worker, check out The Factory.

Lana

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

A deeply unsettling but often quite funny depiction of the pathologies and dysfunctions that define the life of the novel’s titular piano teacher and the rigid, oppressive, moribund classical music culture of Vienna she inhabits. You won’t find a better exploration of being trapped in a life of thwarted ambition, of failing to achieve the greatness and artistic transcendence one’s entire identity and sense of self have been predicated on, of sexual repression, filial or romantic relationships ruined by power and domination, of the latent violence just below the surface of everyday life, thought and society at large. The film adaptation is great, of course, but Jelinek’s prose style and pitch-black sense of humor (which is largely missing from the film) make this a modern classic well worth reading.

Nick

Blue Movie by Terry Southern

I wouldn't recommend this book to hardly anyone in my life, but I did enjoy it. It's completely tasteless, it turns taboo into slapstick and it's impossible to read on the subway – heaven forbid a stranger glance past you and accidentally catch some of the filth so densely packed onto every page of this thing. But the subject of Terry Southern's satire is an industry of perverts that's used glitz and glamour as cover while chewing up beautiful and spitting out broken. Can this be made entertaining? Terry thinks so. Should you be comfortable with it? You should not.

Colby

Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski

I was tempted to recommend War and Peace, which is the most exciting thing I’ve read in the last twelve months. Only that might seem banal. I don’t diminish the importance of the sun if I fail to mention that it rises in the east. So, I’m going for a two-for-one. Tolstoy prompted me to wonder how closely his novel hews to the historical record. Adam Zamoyski’s account of the march on Moscow is a cavalcade of historical horrors and an object lesson in narrative history. Napoleon and Kutuzov as found in War and Peace have only a limited resemblance to their originals. But Tolstoy’s larger argument about the war is borne out by Zamoysky: the fate of nations was decided by men who had no greater grasp or control of their situation than the humblest conscript. Napoleon couldn't even articulate his reasons for invading Russia, let alone present a coherent plan. He certainly didn’t aim to unseat Tsar Alexander or bring liberty to Russia (otherwise he might have recognized Polish sovereignty and declared himself a liberator of the serfs). Kutuzov’s retreats, which proved so deadly to the French, were dictated by fear and incompetence. Only retrospectively were they presented as acts of tactical genius. As Chesterton said, “Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.”

Mark

Capitalists Must Starve by Park Seolyeon

Until a month ago, I felt confident that my book of the year would be one of the John Berger titles I read over the summer, which would have been fair— you should really pick up Understanding a Photograph— but, for me, way too predictable. Then I read Capitalists Must Starve by Park Seolyeon, translated from Korean by Anton Hur, and realized that this addition to an increasingly rare category—the solidarity novel—would have to be my pick. Capitalists Must Starve tells a fictionalized narrative of Kang Juryoung, a labor leader and striking rubber worker who lived in Japanese-occupied Pyongyang in the 1920’s and 30’s. Seolyeon’s sparse yet intimate narration mourns and celebrates the life lived in struggle. For anyone that has felt solidarity course through them at an eviction defense, strike line, mass protest, Capitalists Must Starve beautifully evokes that millions of our comrades, who would otherwise be lost to history, stand beside us now. As Seolyeon writes in her author’s note, “I wanted to reach out to her, this woman who had died before I could meet her. I will not lose my way again. Nor will I die…In this book, my name shall always stand beside hers.”

Tim

Suicide by Édouard Levé

Both a novel and a public suicide note, this book by Edouard Leve is one of the shortest books I read this year but the one that stuck with me the longest. Suicide, written in second person is framed as a letter and observations written to a “friend” who had committed the act a few years earlier. I was hesitant to recommend this because I kept trying to think of books with a less grim topic, but it’s not often that I finish a book and proceed to read every single review and analysis on it.  

Eva

The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

Ellul argues that mankind has surrendered to the logic of technique, discarding other considerations, whether moral, aesthetic, etc in the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. Once there’s no longer a countervailing force to offset the belief in technique’s superiority, we’re resigned to becoming passive observers to its logic. Technique “ipso facto and without indulgence or possible discussion, selects among the means to be employed. The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice.” Written in 1956, this book is both prescient and highly entertaining. I was lucky enough to read this one on a brief stay outside the city, nodding along, reading passages such as: “The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone façades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world." - knowing I’d be back in the “lunar world” soon enough.

Anthony