Blog post

Fall Fiction

50% off Fall Fiction

Verso Books24 October 2019

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.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

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."

[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]

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 IlluminationsOne-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

[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]

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.

[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]

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

[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]

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.
 

[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]

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

Will and Testament

Will and Testament

Longlisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for FictionLonglisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureFour siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a disp...
Paperback
Kitchen Curse
Hailed as a Southeast Asian Gabriel García Márquez for the exuberant beauty of his prose and the darkly comic surrealism of his stories, Eka Kurniawan is the first Indonesian writer to be nominated...
Paradise Rot

Paradise Rot

"As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder."Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickJo is in a strange new country for university and havi...
Paperback (2018)
Man Tiger

Man Tiger

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 ...
The Storyteller
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 Illumi...
Paperback (2016)
We Want Everything

We Want Everything

It was the Autumn of 1969, and Italy exploded. Across the north of the country, factory workers stormed out on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The slogan “We Want Everything” r...
The Lamentations of Zeno

The Lamentations of Zeno

Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradat...
Fear of Mirrors
For some East Germans, the fall of communism was like the end of a long and painful love affair: free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer wanted to hear it. The nation may be reuni...
The Viceroys

The Viceroys

A lost literary classic, written in 1894, The Viceroys is one of the most acclaimed masterworks of Italian realism.The novel follows three generations of the aristocratic Uzeda family as it struggl...
Drought
“He turned his back on the old man to mourn in silence this unnecessary death and his part in it; but the sight of the coffin brought anger instead ...”In 1957, a burned-out British journalist l...
The Unseen

The Unseen

For a brief explosive period in the mid-1970s, the young and the unemployed of Italy’s cities joined the workers in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy (Autonomia). Its “poli...
From A to X
In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A’ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the ...
Utopia
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...

Filed under: fiction, sale