Verso Gift Guide!
Give the books you love (or find something new for yourself!) with 50% off ALL our books!
OUR END OF YEAR SALE IS OVER
Our Gift Guide this year brings together books with the capacity to disrupt systems of unequal distribution; reading that critically engages with the most pressing crises of our time; and utopian thinking for the year ahead.
You will find reading on the rise of automation, the threat of catastrophic climate change, our digital dystopian (or utopian?) futures, and new feminist thinking, as well as books that show us the potential for radical change.
We bring together some of the greatest writers of our time–from John Berger, Angela Davis, and Walter Rodney; to exciting new voices like Jenny Hval, Hito Steyerl, and James Bridle. Gift something you love, or find lots of exciting new reading for the year ahead!
We have 80% off ALL our ebooks and 50% off ALL our print books until January 1 as part of our end-of-year sale! See full details here, as well as further reading lists and our End of Year Highlights.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]The 2019 Verso Radical Diary is a beautifully designed week-to-view planner where you can keep track of the year ahead. Alongside illustrations and book excerpts, it features significant radical dates from throughout history—including the English Civil War and Black Panther movement, through to the protests of 1968 and feminist emancipation, touching on the lives of revolutionaries such as Angela Davis, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Luther King Jr. See inside the diary here!
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.
“I expect many readers will find Bridle’s perceptive and throught-provoking book terrifying rather than enjoyable.” – Will Self, Guardian
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]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. “It’s hard to imagine aesthetics in contemporary art without her" - Alexander Koch, co-owner of the gallery K.O.W.
[book-strip index="4" 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="5" style="buy"]Injustice should not simply be accepted as “the way things are.” This is the starting point for The Xenofeminist Manifesto, a beautifully-illustrated, radical attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. See inside here!
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, and the extraordinary turnaround in Labour’s fortunes in the 2017 election, we have a real opportunity to build an economy in Britain that is radically fairer, radically more democratic, and radically more sustainable.
Economics for the Many, edited and with an introduction by Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell, features contributions from the participants in his New Economics conferences, including Barry Gardiner, Ann Pettifor, Prem Sikka, and Guy Standing. Together, the essays in this volume lay out a vision for a new economics, one that works for the many, not the few.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggle. Weaving together autobiographical reflection, historical analysis, theoretical exegesis, and protest reportage, Mistaken Identity is a passionate call for a new practice of politics beyond colorblind chauvinism and “the ideology of race.”
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]A Mexican-American lawyer exposes corruption in the US asylum procedure and despotism in the Mexican government.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era. Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.
*THIS BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA BY THE END OF NOVEMBER
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]Compulsively readable and meticulously researched, A World to Win demonstrates that, two centuries after Marx’s birth, his work remains the bedrock for any true understanding of our political and economic condition.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]Eleanor Marx is one of the most tragically overlooked radical figures in history, usually overshadowed by her father, Karl. But not only did she edit, translate, transcribe and collaborate with her father, she also led an extraordinary life as a labour organiser, trade unionist, translator, actor, writer and feminist. Yvonne Kapp’s biography, first published at the height of feminist organising in the 1970s, is an unrivalled biography of this incredible radical activist.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]Urgent, timely and compelling; a narrative history of council housing—from slums to the Grenfell Tower.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]In this brilliant, counter-intuitive blast, Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in one complete volume, presented in this beautiful edition.
[book-strip index="17" style="buy"]An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architecture; touching on the art of Gerhard Richter and Louise Bourgeois, the filmmaking of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, media archaeology and the origins of the museum, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno’s book opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.
[book-strip index="18" 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="19" style="buy"]Landscapes, the companion volume to John Berger’s highly acclaimed Portraits, explores what art tells us about ourselves. In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing.
[book-strip index="20" style="buy"]Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.
[book-strip index="21" style="buy"]New edition of this major work examining the development of neoliberalism.
[book-strip index="22" style="buy"]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.
[book-strip index="23" style="buy"]An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis.
[book-strip index="24" style="buy"]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. Perfect reading as we approach the 100th anniversary of her death in January 2019.
[book-strip index="25" style="buy"]Who were the Frankfurt School—Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer—and why do they matter today? Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism.
[book-strip index="26" style="buy"]Acclaimed fantasy author China Miéville plunges us into the year the world was turned upside down.
[book-strip index="27" style="buy"]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. This new edition includes a foreword by Lola Okolosie and an interview with the authors, chaired by Heidi Safia Mirza, focusing on the impact of their book since publication and its continuing relevance today
[book-strip index="28" style="buy"]A major new manifesto for the end of capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.
[book-strip index="29" style="buy"]Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche.
[book-strip index="30" style="buy"]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="31" style="buy"]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. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
*this book is not available in North America from Verso Books.
[book-strip index="32" style="buy"]Anabel Hernández is one of Mexico’s leading investigative journalists. In this new book she tells the shocking story behind the disappearance of forty-three Mexican students. Hernández demolishes the Mexican state’s official version of events, revealing the profound depths of corruption in the Mexican government and police force—as well as the vulnerability of ordinary Mexicans—into stark relief.
[book-strip index="33" style="buy"]A compendium of revolt and resistance: packed full of voices of dissent from every era of human history.
[book-strip index="34" style="buy"]Urgently relevant to current arguments about the crisis of austerity, the 1968 manifesto set out a new agenda for socialist Britain, after the failure of the postwar consensus. The original publication brought together the most influential radical voices of the era. Among the seventy signatories were Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Miliband, and R. D. Laing. This edition comes with an introduction from Owen Jones, who brings a sense of urgency and hope to the contemporary debate.
[book-strip index="35" style="buy"]Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.
[book-strip index="36" style="buy"]Eric Hazan takes the reader on a walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, roughly following the meridian that divides Paris into east and west, and passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Centre, the Gare du Nord and Montmartre, as well as forgotten alleyways and arcades. Weaving historical anecdotes, geographical observations, and literary references, Hazan’s walk guides us through an unknown Paris.
[book-strip index="37" style="buy"]In Praise of Disobedience draws on works from a single miraculous year in which Oscar Wilde published the larger part of his greatest works in prose—the year he came into maturity as an artist. Before the end of 1891, he had written the first of his phenomenally successful plays and met the young man who would win his heart, beginning the love affair that would lead to imprisonment and public infamy.
In a witty introduction, playwright, novelist and Wilde scholar Neil Bartlett explains what made this point in the writer’s life central to his genius and why Wilde remains a provocative and radical figure to this day.
“Latinx” (pronounced “La-teen-ex”) is the gender-neutral term that covers one of the largest and fastest growing minorities in the United States, accounting for 17 percent of the country. Over 58 million Americans belong to the category, including a sizable part of the country’s working class, both foreign and native-born. And yet Latinx barely figure in America’s ongoing conversation about race and ethnicity. Remarkably, the US census does not even have a racial category for “Latino.”
In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje—“mixedness” or “hybridity”—and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America’s infamously black–white racial regime. This searching and long-overdue exploration of the meaning of race in American life reimagines Cornel West’s bestselling Race Matters with a unique Latinx inflection.
[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.
