Blog post

Verso staff picks

We pick our favorite books from Verso's publishing.

Verso Books13 July 2023

Verso staff picks

See ALL our Summer Reading here.

Don't forget: Verso Book Club members get 50% all book purchases year round, plus other great benefits. Sign up today and get your first month free!

Colby, US Direct Marketing 

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Kelly, US Editorial 

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Jennifer, UK Marketing and Publicity

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Federico, Rights

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Michelle, US Publicity 

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Nick, Production

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Mark, Managing Editor

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Anne, US Sales and Publicity 

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Rowan, UK Director

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Anjali, UK Marketing

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Chris, Data Manager

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Leo, UK Editorial 

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Jeanne, Production Editor

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Daniel, Accounts

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Tim, US Publicity 

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Sebastian, UK Editorial 

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Anthony, US Publicity 

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  • The London Hanged
    Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form...
    Paperback
  • Citizens to Lords
    In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory. She traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in...
    Paperback

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  • Restless Cities

    Restless Cities

    The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a ‘city-symphony’ to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities t...
    Paperback
  • Criticism and Ideology
    Terry Eagleton is one of the most important—and most radical—theorists writing today. His witty and acerbic attacks on contemporary culture and society are read and enjoyed by many, and his studies...
    Paperback
  • A Short History of 'Cahiers du Cinéma'
    Cahiers du Cinéma was the single most influential project in the history of film. Founded in 1951, it was responsible for establishing film as the ‘seventh art,’ equal to literature, painting or mu...
    Paperback

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  • The Judge and the Historian

    The Judge and the Historian

    A bomb, an anarchist’s ‘accidental death’, the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportu...
    Paperback

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  • The Seasons of Trouble
    For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 ...
    Paperback
  • Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
    Here is the ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists that operates under the non-name Anonymous, by the writer theHuffington Post says “knows all of Anonymous’ ...
    Paperback
  • Explore Everything
    What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a ...
    Paperback
  • Algiers, Third World Capital
    Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...
    Paperback

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  • Fire and Blood
    Fire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars as a single historical sequence: the age of the European Civil War (1914–1945). Its overture was played out in the trenches of the ...
    Paperback
  • October
    In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining t...

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  • The Essence of Nihilism
    In 1969, Emanuele Severino underwent a Vatican trial for the ‘fundamental incompatibility’ between his thought and the Christian doctrine, and was removed from his position as professor of philosop...
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  • Humankind
    What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Accl...

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  • Hegel Contra Sociology
    Gillian Rose is among the twentieth century’s most important social philosophers. In perhaps her most significant work, Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose mounts a forceful defence of Hegelian speculativ...
    Paperback
  • Before Stalinism
    Before Stalinism is a historical study of democratic life and institutions and their decline in the early years of the Russian Revolution. While attempting to synthesize a wealth of available hi...
    Paperback
  • Considerations on Western Marxism
    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...
    Paperback

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  • Lineages of the Absolutist State
    Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiq...
    Paperback
  • The Limits to Capital
    Now a classic of Marxian economics, The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this edition, Harvey updates his cla...
    Paperback
  • Democracy Against Capitalism
    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...
    Paperback

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  • Heroes
    What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? Through an exhilarating mix of philosophical and psychoanalytical theory and reportage - from the suicide epidemic in Korea to the wav...
    Paperback
  • The Romance of American Communism
    “Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in t...
    Paperback

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  • Savage Messiah

    Savage Messiah

    Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working c...
    Paperback
  • The Many-Headed Hydra
    Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motely crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, labourers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and...
    Paperback
  • The Philosophy of Marx

    The Philosophy of Marx

    Written by one of political theory’s leading thinkers, The Philosophy of Marx examines all the key areas of Marx’s writings in their wider historical and theoretical context—including the concepts ...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • The Mosaic of Islam
    Today, 23 percent of the global population is Muslim, but ignorance and misinformation about Islam persist. In this fascinating and useful book, the acclaimed writer Perry Anderson interviews the n...
    Paperback

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