Verso Gift Guide 2017
We present our annual Gift Guide for all the hard-to-buy-for in your life!
End all your gift-buying woes with our holiday gift guide! We have book suggestions for all the readers in your life, from Russian Revolution enthusiasts to alt-right resisters, hard-to-buy-for theory fans, police abolitionists, post-capitalists, utopian thinkers, dystopian advocates, or anyone gearing up for a radical 2018.
See also our End of Year Highlights and Verso reading lists here.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]LOOKING AHEAD TO A RADICAL NEW YEAR?
The best-selling radical diary is back! The 2018 Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner is a beautifully designed week-to-view diary and planner where you can keep track of your coming year. Packed full of revolutionary dates in history, alongside radical posters, illustrations and short book extracts; it's the perfect planner for the year ahead.
See more photos here!
THE ULTIMATE BOOK ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history. In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?
See all our Russian Revolution reading here.
HOW AND WHY THE POLICE ENDANGER US
Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON THE ALT-RIGHT
Investigative reporter David Neiwert has been tracking extremists for more than two decades. The product of years of reportage, and including the most in-depth investigation of Trump’s ties to the far right, this is a crucial book about one of the most disturbing aspects of American society.
INSPIRATIONAL BLACK RADICAL THOUGHT
Key intellectuals—inspired by the new movements and by the seminal work of the scholar Cedric J. Robinson—recall the powerful tradition of Black radicalism while defining new directions for the activists and thinkers it inspires.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]LOOKING FOR A POWERFUL NEW POLITICAL VISION?
A toxic ideology of extreme competition and individualism has come to dominate our world. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better future.Urgent and passionate, Out of the Wreckage provides the hope and clarity required to change the world.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]FOR READERS OF ORWELL'S The Road To Wigan Pier
We are living in an age with unprecedented levels of poverty. Who are the new poor? And what can we do about it? On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report Stephen Armstrong asks what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]FOR RADICALS EVERYWHERE
A compendium of revolt and resistance: packed full of voices of dissent from every era of human history.
OUR CITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE: WHAT LIES AHEAD?
How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]SQUATTING AND THE CITY
A radical history of squatting and the struggle for the right to remake the city.
ESSAYS ON THE URBAN
Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical ’60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]HISTORY, WITH A DIFFERENCE
An engrossing century-spanning narrative, Tear Gas is the first history of how this chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH BLACK WORKING CLASS
A classic history of the role of Black working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]A MUST-READ FROM ANGELA DAVIS
With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power.
THE ULTIMATE LATINA PERSPECTIVE ON RACE AND LIBERATION
Elizabeth Martínez’s unique Chicana voice has been formed through over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. This essay collection describes the ideas and new movements created by the rapidly expanding US Latina/o community as it confronts intensified exploitation and racism.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY
Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.
LEFEBVRE'S CLASSIC CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM
The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in this beautifully designed complete volume. The perfect gift for the theory fan in your life!
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]THE PERFECT THEORY GIFT
Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Here we present this classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time in this beautifully designed edition.
[book-strip index="19" style="buy"]FANS OF ROSA LUXUMBERG WILL LOVE
A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. In this beautifully drawn work of graphic biography, writer and artist Kate Evans has opened up her subject’s intellectual world to a new audience, grounding Luxemburg’s ideas in the realities of an inspirational and deeply affecting life.
LENIN: EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW
On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali paints an illuminating portrait of Lenin.
[book-strip index="21" style="buy"]JOHN BERGER ON ARTISTS
Now out in paperback, Portraits presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world’s most incisive critical voices.
See also Landscapes — the companion volume to Portraits.
[book-strip index="22" style="buy"]THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF SOLIDARITY
What is the true meaning of happiness? Radical Happiness is a passionate call for the re-discovery of the political and emotional joy that emerge when we learn to share our lives together.
FOR FANS OF SUSAN SONTAG
Mark Greif's critically acclaimed essay collection is now out in paperback.
[book-strip index="24" style="buy"]WHO WERE THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL?
Who were the Frankfurt School—Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer—and why do they matter today? Stuart Jeffries best-selling book is now out in paperback.
[book-strip index="25" style="buy"]FROM THE JEWISH EAST END TO COMMUNIST CAMPING: A MEMOIR
The brilliant family memoir of the much-beloved poet and political campaigner.
[book-strip index="26" style="buy"]ART IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.
[book-strip index="27" style="buy"]BJÖRK LOVES HIM
What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Acclaimed object-oriented philosopher Timothy Morton invites us to consider this philosophical issue as eminently political.
[book-strip index="28" style="buy"]ONE FOR ART THEORY ENTHUSIASTS
Leading artists, theorists, and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present.
[book-strip index="29" style="buy"]FOR POETRY FANS
In this singular book written during World War Two, Bertolt Brecht presents a devastating visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. He takes photographs from newspapers and popular magazines, and adds short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media.
FOR FANS OF SYLVIA PLATH AND KATE ZAMBRENO
"A thirty-year-old woman from a working-class background who had turned to literature after completing vocational training in secretarial work, Fritz came seemingly out of nowhere to astonish the literary world with her merciless, spare and tightly wrought chronicle of domestic horror that displayed an apparently effortless balance of wit and philosophy." –Times Literary Supplement
[book-strip index="31" style="buy"]HOW CAN WE BREAK THE MONEY SYSTEM?
In this accessible, brilliantly argued book, leading political economist Ann Pettifor explains in straightforward terms history’s most misunderstood invention: the money system. Pettifor argues that democracies can, and indeed must, reclaim control over money production and restrain the out-of-control finance sector so that it serves the interests of society, as well as the needs of the ecosystem.
[book-strip index="32" style="buy"]CAPITALISM IS DEAD
Now available in paperback, Wolfgang Streeck's bestselling critique of capitalism.
[book-strip index="33" style="buy"]AN UNFORGETTABLE NARRATIVE OF THE REFUGEE CRISIS
Combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic-book storytelling, Evans has produced this heartbreaking, full-color graphic novel of the refugee drama. Threads addresses one of the most pressing issues of modern times to make a compelling case, through intimate evidence, for the compassionate treatment of refugees and the free movement of peoples.
[book-strip index="34" style="buy"]THE REAL PRICE OF INCARCERATION FOR WOMEN
Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States. In their own words, the thirteen narrators in this book recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their experiences inside—ranging from forced sterilization and shackling during childbirth, to physical and sexual abuse by prison staff. Together, their testimonies illustrate the harrowing struggles for survival that women in prison must endure.
[book-strip index="35" style="buy"]THE POWER OF PROTEST
A longtime movement insider's powerful account of the origins of today's protest movements and what they can achieve now.
THE ABSOLUTE BOOK ON THE ABSOLUTE BOY!
In the 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn pulled off an historic upset, attracting the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945. For the first time in decades, socialism is back on the agenda—and for the first time in Labour’s history, it defines the leadership. Richard Seymour tells the story of how Corbyn’s rise.
[book-strip index="37" style="buy"]HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?
Now out in paperback: George Monbiot's searing critique of the mess we find ourselves in.
[book-strip index="38" style="buy"]FROM THE VERSO ARCHIVE!
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.
[book-strip index="39" style="buy"]FOR THE PASSIONATE HISTORICAL REENATOR IN YOUR LIFE!
The gripping story of the Levellers, the radical movement at the heart of the English Revolution, now available in paperback.
[book-strip index="40" style="buy"]THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON ISIS
From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegration. Now out in paperback.
