To mark the start of the academic year, we have 40% off all books until the end of September. This includes foundational works of left theory from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, to Ellen Meiksin Wood's The Origin of Capitalism, Adorno's Minima Moralia, and Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion.

Browse our Student Reading Guides here.

We bundle the ebook, for free, with every print book purchase! That means you can start reading your ebook straight away, whilst waiting for your book to arrive in the mail.

See all terms and conditions at the bottom of this post.

Reading Lists

Browse all our student reading guides here. Some highlights:

10 Books Every Student Should Read: must-read Verso classics.

Decolonise Your Bookshelf: books that challenge imperial narratives.

Key Debates in Theory: the most pressing debates in left theory from 50 years of radical publishing.

Western Marxist Theory: featuring Perry Anderson, Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, and more.

Race, Class and History: featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Adolph Reed, and more.

Climate, Environment, and Ecology: from Andreas Malm to Noam Chomsky.

Should We All Log Off? Reflections on the politics of digital culture

Philosophy: Key Verso Reading: key Verso reading featuring Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Alain Badiou.

Author Bookshelves

Browse all our authors here. You can also find a collection of author bookshelves here. Some highlights:

Walter Rodney: A Lightening Rod of Black Working Class Power

Nancy Fraser: Reframing our Understanding of Marxist Theory

Theodor Adorno: A Leading Figure of the Frankfurt School

Ellen Meiksins Wood: Groundbreaking Marxist Historian and Political Thinker 

Erik Olin Wright: The Greatest Marxist Sociologist of His Time 

Mike Davis: Prophetic Marxist Historian and Activist

Essential Verso Texts

Highlights from across our Student Reading:

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"] 

Terms and Conditions

40% off all books will end at midnight (EDT) on September 30, 2023. It applies to all available books and ebooks on our website.

Each individual book page shows the various available formats of a book. Typically there will be a print edition, and an ebook edition listed on the page.

Not all books are available in all regions: it will be clear on the book page whether something is available for you to purchase.

Some books may be out of stock or out of print in your region. We are unable to retrospectively apply the discount if these books come back into stock outside of the sale period.

All print book purchases will include the bundled ebook edition for free! See all our ebook FAQs here.

Some older titles are not yet available in ebook format. We're working on it!

If you experience any issues please email: orders@versobooks.com (for US and Canada customers) or orders@verso.co.uk (for UK, Europe and Rest of World customers).

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...

Racecraft

by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...

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...

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...

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...

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...

For a Left Populism

by Chantal Mouffe

We are seeing the rise of a populist moment around the world on both the left and the right. Movements like Bernie Sander, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have emerged in the midst of the ...

The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...

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...

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...

Considerations on Western Marxism

by Perry Anderson

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Ru...

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

by Perry Anderson

Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...

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...

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...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

Fortunes of Feminism

by Nancy Fraser

Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a dec...

A Companion To Marx's Capital

by David Harvey

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectur...

The Political Writings

by Karl Marx

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. For the first time ever, this book brings together all of his essential political...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

Confronting Capitalism

by Vivek Chibber

Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it often difficult for working people to organize arou...

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...

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

by Friedrich Engels

Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock

In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropologica...

Glitch Feminism

by Legacy Russell

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...

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...

The Left Hemisphere

by Razmig Keucheyan

Translated by Gregory Elliott

As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefiel...

The Return of the Political

by Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffe is one of the most influential political theorists at work today. Her work has influenced political parties across Europe and continues to inform the direction of left politics. In t...

Workers and Capital

by Mario Tronti

Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-...

Towards a New Manifesto

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism...

Democracy Against Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference”, and contingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subjec...

Filed under: student-reading