Reading list

Verso Beach Reads

Some light reading to slide into your suitcase this summer!

Verso Books 5 July 2024

The sun is shining, summer is here, and you know what that means - time to crack open your copy of The Political Writings by Karl Marx.

As a friendly reminder: Verso Book Club members enjoy 50% off all titles year-round on purchases of any size. It's a great deal and the best way to support radical publishing!

New Releases

Hot off the press, featuring urgent interventions on industrialization, Black visual culture, and the housing crisis.

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

Verso's Big Theory Summer Reads

Bring a sturdy beach bag and you’re all set!

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

I don't dream of labour... I dream of the beach

I wasn’t born to work. I was born to frolic on the beach and sit and think and read and live.

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

Love in the Age of Capitalism

What’s love got to do with it? Everything! Essential reads on how capital influences and forms our intimate relationships.

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

It's Getting Too Hot to Handle

Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?

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

What comes next in the UK? Post-Election reading

Books to understand Britain’s political landscape, far-right populism, and how we can build our own Left movements.

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

Why Don't We Just Print More Money?

Infuriate the finance bros in your life with a cohesive, well sourced, socialist economics

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

Free Palestine: Verso Reading

A reading list on the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation.

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

Verso Fiction

Revolutionary stories, with an international focus, beautifully written.

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

Silly Little Walk Season

What if we took our silly little walks a little more seriously? As Eric Hazan wrote: ‘To saunter is a science,‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’

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

School's Out and the Students are our Teachers

The school year is ending, but the ongoing occupation of campuses by student activists for Palestine around the world highlights that their political education is ongoing!

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

Happy Apocalypse

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Broder

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact h...

Black Meme

by Legacy Russell

In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and co...

Against Landlords

by Nick Bano

Against Landlords overturns the stale assumptions and YIMBY delusions as to why housing in the UK is so poor, and why rent is so high. Bano lays the blame squarely at the feet of landlordism, which...

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...

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...

The Automatic Fetish

by Beverley Best

The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central thr...

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...

Troublemaking

by Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock

There has been an explosion of organising among workers many assumed to be unorganisable, from delivery drivers in London to tech workers in Silicon Valley. The culmination of years of conversation...

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...

Lean on Me

by Lynne Segal

Have you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades?Questions of care, intimacy, educatio...

They Call It Love

by Alva Gotby

They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the femi...

Love and Money, Sex and Death

by McKenzie Wark

After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relati...

Chaos in the Heavens

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences o...

Future of Denial

by Tad DeLay

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timel...

Lifehouse

by Adam Greenfield

A Lifehouse is an institution at the heart of each neighborhood that responds to the terrifying reality of climate collapse in our own communities.In this book Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Te...

The Price is Wrong

by Brett Christophers

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently pr...

Our Lives in Their Portfolios

by Brett Christophers

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financia...

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...

Faraway the Southern Sky

by Joseph Andras

Translated by Simon Leser

Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, t...

The Last Sane Woman

by Hannah Regel

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. Ther...

If Only

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the m...

Balzac's Paris

by Eric Hazan

In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a lovin...

A Philosophy of Walking

by Frédéric Gros

Translated by John Howe

By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no...

How We Walk

by Matthew Beaumont

You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait r...

From the River to the Sea

Edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren

In the final months of 2023, as this ebook is published, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly made their intentions to do so extremely clear; talking of collec...

The Verso Book of Dissent

Preface by Tariq Ali

Edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim

Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest-rallying others around them or, sometimes, inspiring uprisings many y...

Late Fascism

by Alberto Toscano

The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great ...

The Starmer Project

by Oliver Eagleton

Hailed as a human-rights champion and political outsider, what sort of politician is Keir Starmer really, and what mark is he making on the new politics of Labour? In The Starmer Project, Oliver Ea...

Shattered Nation

by Danny Dorling

Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further...

Against Landlords

by Nick Bano

The New Populism

by Marco Revelli

The word ‘populism’ has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to T...

Bloody Panico!

by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The most successful political party in history?The Tory Party has been in power for eighty-five of the past 135 years. In 2019 they won their largest parliamentary majority in more than three decad...

Is Socialism Possible in Britain?

by Andrew Murray

Selected as one of the 15 best political and current affairs books of 2022 by The TimesIs Socialism Possible in Britain? analyses Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader and the prospects for parli...

The Palestine Laboratory

by Antony Loewenstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingShortlisted for the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territ...

Towers of Ivory and Steel

by Maya Wind

Afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley

Foreword by Nadia Abu El Haj

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, ...

Filed under: versoreadinglists