Verso Book Club: December and January picks
Receive ALL of our new ebooks every month as well as one or more new books in the mail. Now at a discount of 50% to celebrate Verso’s 50th year, all subscribers will also get 50% off ALL of our books.
In our 50th year, we are excited to announce the Verso Book Club! Join now and get every new ebook that we publish, as well as one or more new books in the mail if you choose a print subscription. All Book Club members will also get 50% off everything on our website, for as long as you are a subscriber. To celebrate our 50th year of radical publishing and the launch of our book club, each member tier is 50% off for the first three months.
You can choose between three options: the Verso Reader digital subscription, Verso Subscriber for print and digital, and Verso Comrade to receive even more books in the mail (including one new work of politics or theory every month, as well as the occasional classic from Verso’s backlist). Learn more about the different member options here.
Every month we’ll offer a carefully curated selection of our best new titles, across a wide range of topics and subject areas, to bring you books that everyone at Verso regards as essential reading. In mid-December, we’ll email all members with more details about the January book club selections—including a letter from the editor—so that you can choose which one you want to receive, any time before the end of the month.
In December, we've selected the best books we published from the first part of the year plus Comrades will get our brand-new "Comrade" canvas tote bag.
SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
DECEMBER Book Club Selection
Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution edited by Breanne Fahs. In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto—raging and wanting, quarreling and provoking—has always played a central role in feminism, and it’s the angry, brash feminism we need now.
Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth and translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Ellinor, a thirty-five-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she’s not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she’s ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.
Verso Comrades will also receive:
Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula by Laleh Khalili. The story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Arabian peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is an account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.
The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim. This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent should be in the arsenal of every rebel who understands that words and ideas are the ultimate weapons.
Verso Tote Bag 2020 from Verso Books. Calling all comrades! In our 50th year we are delighted to bring you this Verso canvas bag–big enough to carry around Lefebvre's 900-page Critique of Everyday Life, and sturdy enough to stash a milkshake. On one side is the word COMRADE in elongated black type and on the other side is the Verso logo in black type in the bottom corner. Beautifully designed, hardy and designed to last, we hope you love these bags as much as we do!
All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
Learn more about the Verso Book Club—including more detailed information on all the membership tiers. Confused or have any questions? We hope our FAQs will help, but you can also email us at bookclub@versobooks.com—we would love to get your feedback!
JANUARY Book Club Selection
Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm. In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.
The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? by Emma Dowling. In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multi-faceted nature of care in the modern world, from the mantras of self-care and what they tell us about our anxieties, to the state of the social care system. She examines the relations of power that play profitability and care off in against one another in a myriad of ways, exposing the devastating impact of financialisation and austerity.
Verso Comrades will also receive:
Capitalism and the Sea The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World by Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás. The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilisation—warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere. In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyse these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens.
Lessons on Rousseau by Louis Althusser and translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau’s ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the “late Althusser’s” theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy “for Marx” were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau’s text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.
