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Our Most Popular Ebooks!

70% off as part of our ebook sale! Curate your dream Verso ebook reading list.

Verso Books16 August 2023

To help you put together your dream ebook reading list, we bring you our best-selling ebooks across the last year.

Flash ebook sale: all our ebooks are 70% off until August 18! See full details here.

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70% off ALL ebooks ends August 18 at midnight. See more here!

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchme...

Communism and Strategy

by Isabelle Garo

If the question of communism is making a comeback today, this renewed interest is often accompanied by an abandonment of any concrete political perspective. Critical philosophies are flourishing an...

Power and Resistance

by Yoshiyuki Sato

The "structuralist" theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we think of the subject's resistance to power? Based on this fund...

Bad Gays

by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have ...

Without Apology

by Jenny Brown

With an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court, and several states with only one abortion clinic, many reproductive rights activists are on the defensive, hoping to hold on to abortion in a fe...

The Politics of Immunity

by Mark Neocleous

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, im...

The Wages of Whiteness

by David R. Roediger

Preface by Priyamvada Gopal

Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver

An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less ab...

Keystroke Capitalism

by Aaron Sahr

Translated by Sharon Howe

Contemporary capitalism produces more and more money, debt, and inequality. These three trends have a common cause: the privilege of private banks to create money by means of accounting - by the st...

Not by Omission

by Amnon Kapeliouk

Introduction by Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier

In this book, first published in Hebrew in 1975 and now available in English for the first time with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Amnon Kapeliouk traces the policies and attitudes that led to t...

Psychopolitics

by Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Erik Butler

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower...

The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefr...

Work Without the Worker

by Philip Jones

We are told that the future of work will be increasingly automated. Algorithms, processing massive amounts of information at startling speed, will lead us to a new world of effortless labour and a ...

Girl Online

by Joanna Walsh

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to a...

Planet on Fire

by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton

As we rebuild our lives in the wake of Covid-19 and face the challenges of ecological disaster, how can the left win a world fit for life? Planet on Fire is an urgent manifesto for a fundamental ...

Gwangju Uprising

by Lee Jae-eui, Hwang Sok-yong and Jeon Yong-ho

On 18th May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d’état and martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with u...

Captives

by Jarrod Shanahan

Captives combines a thrilling narrative account of Rikers Island’s descent into infamy with a dramatic retelling of the last seventy years of New York and American politics from the vantage point o...

Red List

by David Caute

In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is known chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who endanger national security—from Nazi fifth column...

Proletarian China

Edited by Ivan Franceschini, Kevin Lin, Nicholas Loubere and Christian Sorace

In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party’s humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing ha...

Rentier Capitalism

by Brett Christophers

In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as ‘rentier cap...

Uncomputable

by Alexander Galloway

Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought the...

The Revenge of the Real

by Benjamin Bratton

The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognises that how populations govern themselves is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconn...

The Poverty of Ethics

by Anat Matar

The Poverty of Ethics stands the usual moral-political dichotomy on its head. It argues that moral principles do not in fact underlie or inform political decisions. It is, rather, the conceptual pr...

Abolish the Family

by Sophie Lewis

What if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonmen...

Governing the World Without World Government

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

The world does not need a world government to govern itself. Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that there is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests. We...

Owning the Future

by Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence

The question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset...

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies

by Leslie Kern

What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the mo...

Post-Growth Living

by Kate Soper

The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposa...

Winston Churchill

by Tariq Ali

The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson in his failing attempts to be magi...

Mimesis

by Valery Podoroga

Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

Valery Podoroga was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. Here his most famous work is translated into English for the first time. In it he gives a panorama view of Russian writing,...

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

by Stuart Jeffries

But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and cont...

The Rise of a New Left

by Raina Lipsitz

A new progressive generation is on the rise in the United States, reflected in the mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America (90,000 mostly twentysomething members), Marxist explain...

Climate Change as Class War

by Matthew T. Huber

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As ...

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

by Olivier Guez

Translated by Georgia de Chamberet

For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through Sout...

The Choreography of Everyday Life

by Annie-B Parson

In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance—time, proximity, space, motion and tone— into text. As we follo...

New Dark Age

by James Bridle

From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically gener...

They Call It Love

by Alva Gotby

Comforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would...

Cannibal Capitalism

by Nancy Fraser

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. ...

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...

Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space

by Christian Schmid

This book presents an encompassing, detailed and thorough overview and reconstruction of Lefebvre’s theory of space and of the urban. Henri Lefebvre belongs to the generation of the great French in...

Making the Revolution Global

by Theo Williams

Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...

Taking A Long Look

by Vivian Gornick

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and pe...

Old Gods, New Enigmas

by Mike Davis

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an...

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically u...

Fossil Capital

by Andreas Malm

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began...

Humanitarian Borders

by Polly Pallister-Wilkins

*Winner of the International Political Sociology book award for 2023*What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the ...

Against Borders

by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha

Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveilla...

Is Mother Dead

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...

Fighting in a World on Fire

by Andreas Malm

Contributions by Jimmy Whipps and Llewyn Whipps

Young people are inheriting a world of climate catastrophe. Young people are also one of the strongest forces leading movements for climate justice, and to halt the fossil fuel emissions that are m...

Marx's Literary Style

by Ludovico Silva

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expressio...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

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 availabl...

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

by Erik Olin Wright

Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solid...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

Policing the Planet

Contributions by Mizue Aizeki, Kafui Attoh, Breanna Champion, Becky Dennison, Martín Espada, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Christina B. Hanhardt, Justin Hansford, Rachel Herzing, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Anjali Kamat, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hamid Khan, Arun Kundnani, Marisol Lebrón, George Lipsitz, Page May, Don Mitchell, Naomi Murakawa, Steven Osuna, Vijay Prashad, Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn, Alex Sanchez, Lynn A. Staeheli, Alex S. Vitale and Pete White

Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first e...

The Force of Nonviolence

by Judith Butler

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 pas...

Portraits

by John Berger

John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artis...

Set the Night on Fire

by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...

After Black Lives Matter

by Cedric G. Johnson

Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? After Black Lives Matter argues that the core of the movement itse...

The Trial of Julian Assange

by Nils Melzer

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, uncovers a systematic campaign to persecute Assange. He reveals that Assange has faced grave and systematic due process violations, judicial bia...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

Reading Capital

by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière

Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

Bad Gays

by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Communism and Strategy

by Isabelle Garo

Power and Resistance

by Yoshiyuki Sato

Without Apology

by Jenny Brown

The Politics of Immunity

by Mark Neocleous

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

The Wages of Whiteness

by David R. Roediger

Preface by Priyamvada Gopal

Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver

Keystroke Capitalism

by Aaron Sahr

Translated by Sharon Howe

Not by Omission

by Amnon Kapeliouk

Introduction by Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier

Psychopolitics

by Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Erik Butler

The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

Work Without the Worker

by Philip Jones

Girl Online

by Joanna Walsh

Planet on Fire

by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton

As we rebuild our lives in the wake of Covid-19 and face the challenges of ecological disaster, how can the left win a world fit for life? Planet on Fire is an urgent manifesto for a fundamental ...

Gwangju Uprising

by Lee Jae-eui, Hwang Sok-yong and Jeon Yong-ho

Captives

by Jarrod Shanahan

Red List

by David Caute

Proletarian China

Edited by Ivan Franceschini, Kevin Lin, Nicholas Loubere and Christian Sorace

Rentier Capitalism

by Brett Christophers

Uncomputable

by Alexander Galloway

The Revenge of the Real

by Benjamin Bratton

The Poverty of Ethics

by Anat Matar

Abolish the Family

by Sophie Lewis

Governing the World Without World Government

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Owning the Future

by Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies

by Leslie Kern

Post-Growth Living

by Kate Soper

Winston Churchill

by Tariq Ali

Mimesis

by Valery Podoroga

Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

by Stuart Jeffries

But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and cont...

The Rise of a New Left

by Raina Lipsitz

Climate Change as Class War

by Matthew T. Huber

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

by Olivier Guez

Translated by Georgia de Chamberet

Hit Parade of Tears

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O'Horan

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of t...

Terminal Boredom

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O'Horan

On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently int...

The Choreography of Everyday Life

by Annie-B Parson

New Dark Age

by James Bridle

They Call It Love

by Alva Gotby

Cannibal Capitalism

by Nancy Fraser

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space

by Christian Schmid

Making the Revolution Global

by Theo Williams

Taking A Long Look

by Vivian Gornick

Old Gods, New Enigmas

by Mike Davis

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

Fossil Capital

by Andreas Malm

Humanitarian Borders

by Polly Pallister-Wilkins

After Work

by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleanin...

Erasing Palestine

by Rebecca Ruth Gould

The widespread adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism and the internalisation of its norms has set in motion a simplistic definitional logic for dealing with social problems that has impo...

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand.'Deep ...

Quick Fixes

by Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong

This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the boar...

Capitalism

by Nancy Fraser

Capitalism, by the twenty-first century, has brought us an era of escalating, overlapping crisis - ecological, political, social - which we may not survive. In this brilliant, wide-ranging conversa...

What Is Antiracism?

by Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...

Bodies Under Siege

by Sian Norris

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extr...

Working Girl

by Sophia Giovannitti

Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodificati...

Miss Major Speaks

by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the H...

City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...

Abolition Geography

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...

Half-Earth Socialism

by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese

Over the next generation, humanity will confront a dystopian future of climate disaster and mass extinction. Yet the only "solutions" on offer are toothless cap-and-trade programs, catastrophic geo...

I Fear My Pain Interests You

by Stephanie LaCava

Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New ...

Health Communism

by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing th...

Decolonial Marxism

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...

The Future is Degrowth

by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter

Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalis...

Organize, Fight, Win

by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...

A Social History of Western Political Thought

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines th...

Mutual Aid

by Dean Spade

Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal imm...

Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...

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