Verso Paperbacks of the Year!
A round-up of our 2017 paperback highlights!
See our End of Year Highlights and Gift Guide. You can also browse our Verso reading lists here.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]Against Everything is a thought-provoking study and essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]Who were the Frankfurt School—Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer—and why do they matter today? Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]An engrossing century-spanning narrative, Tear Gas is the first history of this weapon, and takes us from military labs and chemical weapons expos to union assemblies and protest camps, drawing on declassified reports and witness testimonies to show how policing with poison came to be.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated. In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. In penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world’s most incisive critical voices.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]We are living in an age with unprecedented levels of poverty. Who are the new poor? And what can we do about it? On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report Stephen Armstrong asks what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]This book recovers the history of the revolutionary Jewish tradition: tracing the struggles of Jewish militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions—a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]"A thirty-year-old woman from a working-class background who had turned to literature after completing vocational training in secretarial work, Fritz came seemingly out of nowhere to astonish the literary world with her merciless, spare and tightly wrought chronicle of domestic horror that displayed an apparently effortless balance of wit and philosophy." –Times Literary Supplement
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegration.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]In the 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn pulled off an historic upset, attracting the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945. For the first time in decades, socialism is back on the agenda—and for the first time in Labour’s history, it defines the leadership. Richard Seymour tells the story of how Corbyn’s rise.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]A major new exploration of the refugee crisis, focusing on how borders are formed and policed. Newly updated with a discussion of Brexit and the Trump administration.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]George Monbiot is one of the most vocal, and eloquent, critics of the current consensus. How Did We Get into this Mess?, based on his powerful journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]A radical history of squatting and the struggle for the right to remake the city.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]Key intellectuals—inspired by the new movements and by the seminal work of the scholar Cedric J. Robinson—recall the powerful tradition of Black radicalism while defining new directions for the activists and thinkers it inspires.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]A classic history of the role of Black working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.
[book-strip index="17" style="buy"]The gripping story of the Levellers, the radical movement at the heart of the English Revolution.
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]Delving into her own life and those who left their mark on it, Lynne Segal journeys through time to consider her generation of female dreamers, the experiences that formed them, what they have left to the world, and how they are remembered in a period when pessimism pervades public life.
[book-strip index="19" style="buy"]Elizabeth Martínez’s unique Chicana voice has been formed through over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. This essay collection describes the ideas and new movements created by the rapidly expanding US Latina/o community as it confronts intensified exploitation and racism.
[book-strip index="20" style="buy"]The myths—and reality—behind the state of Israel.
[book-strip index="21" style="buy"]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, imperialism, and the modern nation state.
