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Verso Book Club: September, October, November, December

Receive ALL of our new ebooks every month as well as one or more new books in the mail. All subscriptions are now 50% off and all subscribers will also get 50% off ALL of our books.

Verso Books16 August 2021

Verso Book Club: September, October, November, December

Last year, in our 50th year of radical publishing, we launched the Verso Book Club. This subscription offers our readers the chance to get the most essential books that we publish each month and the steady support allows us the security to keep expanding our revolutionary publishing program. 

Every month we’ll offer a carefully curated selection of our best new titles; this fall we have books on how modern jihad echoes the crises of western liberalism, how Amazon shapes contemporary fiction, the politics of work, and more. Each month we email all members with more details about next month's book club selections—including a letter from the editor—so that you can choose which one you want to receive.

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 a classic from Verso’s backlist). Learn more about the different member options here. All Book Club members will also get 50% off everything on our website, for as long as you are a subscriber. Each member tier is 50% off for the first three months.
 

SEPTEMBER Book Club Selection

Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
 

The Apocalypse and the End of HistoryThe Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism by Suzanne Schneider. Written with the sensibility of a political theorist and based on extensive research into a wide range of sources, from Islamic jurisprudence to popular recruitment videos, contemporary apocalyptic literature and the Islamic State's Arabic-language publications, the book explores modern jihad as an image of a potential dark future already heralded by neoliberal modes of life.
 

The Spoils of WarThe Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine by Andrew Cockburn. In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the west from the dangers of Islamists. US soldiers are stationed in more than 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In The Spoils of War Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the intentions behind Washington’s martial appetites. Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: squalid, and at the same time terrifyingly dangerous.


 

Verso Comrades will also receive:

Ever Closer Union?Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West by Perry Anderson. Sixty years after the founding treaty, what sort of structure has crystallised, and does the promise of ever closer union still obtain? Against the self-image of the bloc, Perry Anderson poses the historical record of its assembly. He traces the wider arc of European history, from First World War to Eurozone crisis, the hegemony of Versailles to that of Maastricht, and casts the work of the EU’s leading contemporary analysts—both independent critics and court philosophers—in older traditions of political thought. Are there likenesses to the age of Metternich, lessons in statecraft from that of Machiavelli?
 

2022 Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner2022 Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner by Verso Books. The 2022 Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner is a beautifully designed week-to-view planner where you can keep track of your coming year. Alongside illustrations, it features significant dates in radical history, drawn from events such as the English Civil War and Black Panther movement, through to the protests of 1968 and feminist emancipation, touching on the lives of revolutionaries such as Angela Davis, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Luther King Jr., and includes movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Suffragettes.


 

All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
 

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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE


OCTOBER Book Club Selection

Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
 

Everything, All the Time, EverywhereEverything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries. In this brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and still dominates our lives today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, among others: David Bowie, the iPod, Madonna, Jeff Koons’s the Nixon Shock, Judith Butler, Las Vegas, Margaret Thatcher, Grand Master Flash, I Love Dick, the RAND Corporation, the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, Grand Theft Auto, Jean Baudrillard, Netflix, and 9/11.
 

Everything and LessEverything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl. With an eye on the longer history of the novel, this witty, acerbic book tells a story that connects Henry James to E. L. James, and Faulkner and Hemingway to contemporary romance, science fiction and fantasy writers. In opening the floodgates of popular literary expression as never before, the age of Amazon shows a democratic promise, as well as what it means when literary culture becomes corporate culture in the broadest but also deepest and most troubling sense.


 

Verso Comrades will also receive:

RevolutionRevolution: An Intellectual History by Enzo Traverso. This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”: Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s sexually liberated bodies, Lenin’s mummified body, Auguste Blanqui’s barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune’s demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals—from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C. L. R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South—as outcasts and pariahs.
 

Work Without the WorkerWork Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Phil Jones. Recent years have seen a boom in online crowd-working platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Clickworker, and these have become an increasingly important source of work for millions of people. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labour looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.


All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
 

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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
 

NOVEMBER Book Club Selection

Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:

 

Ending Fossil FuelsEnding Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough by Holly Jean Buck. Around the world, countries and companies are setting net-zero carbon emissions targets. But “net-zero” is a term that conveniently obscures multiple futures. There could be a version of net-zero where the fossil fuel industry is still spewing tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and has built a corresponding industry in sucking it back out again. Holly Buck argues that focusing on emissions draws our attention away from where we need to be looking: the point of production.

Space ForcesSpace Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen. For the Russian cosmonauts of the 1890s space was a place to pursue human perfection away from the Earth. Today, the market has arrived into outer space and exploration is the plaything of superrich technology billionaires, who plan to privatize the mineral wealth for themselves. Are other worlds really possible? Bringing these figures and ideas together reveals a completely different story of our relationship with outer space, as well as the dangers of our current direction of extractive capitalism and colonization.


Verso Comrades will also receive:
 

The Anthropocene UnconsciousThe Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe in Contemporary Culture by Mark Bould. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature—across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions—this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term “the Anthropocene,” including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations.
 

DarkwaterDarkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Du Bois. The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Part essay, part autobiography, Darkwater explicitly addresses significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines.
 


All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:

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DECEMBER Book Club Selection

Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
 

The Forty Year War in AfghanistanThe Forty Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali. Ali has been following the wars in Afghanistan for forty years. He opposed Soviet military intervention in 1979, predicting disaster. He was also a fierce critic of its NATO sequel, “Operation Enduring Freedom.” In a series of trenchant commentaries, he described the tragedies inflicted on Afghanistan, as well as the semi-Talibanization and militarization of neighbouring Pakistan. Most of his predictions proved accurate. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan brings together the best of his writings and includes a new introduction.
 

Feminism and Nationalism in the Third WorldFeminism and Nationalism in the Third World by Kumari Jayawardena. For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East. In this engaging and well-researched survey, Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality.


 

Verso Comrades will also receive:

Democracy Against CapitalismDemocracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism 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 subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical program of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power.
 

The Pristine Culture of CapitalismThe Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a “modern” state and political culture in Continental Europe, signaled the persistence of pre-capitalist social property relations. Conversely, the absence of a “modern” state and political discourse in England testified to the presence of a well-developed capitalism. The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.


 

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!

Economics and the Left
Economics and the Left presents interviews with 24 leading progressive economists, whose life work has been dedicated to both interpreting the world and changing it for the better. They all deploy...
Happy Hour
With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York CityRefreshing and wry in ...
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the “War on Terror.” Importantly, Kumar contends that Isl...
The Party's Over
Today, it is not a question of if, but when? What we are watching is the collapse of the most successful political party in Europe. Despite winning the December 2019 General Election, the parliamen...
Feminist City
What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space wi...
Overtime
Overtime is about the politics of time, and specifically the amount of time that we spend labouring within capitalist society. It argues that reactivating the longstanding demand for shorter workin...
The Northern Question
Britain has scarcely begun to come to terms with its recent upheavals, from the crisis over Brexit to the collapse of Labour’s 'red wall'. What can explain such momentous shifts?In this essential w...
The World Turned Inside Out
Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in ‘empty lands’ somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. While the lands...
Revolution and Counterrevolution in China
Over recent decades China has experienced massive change and development. China is the world’s fastest growing economy, and has become a global superpower once again. But this development has throw...
This is Not Normal
Since 2016, the UK has been in a crisis of its own making: but this is not the fault of Brexit but of a larger problem of our politics. The status of political parties, the mainstream media, public...
A Kick in the Belly
The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation.Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical r...
Becoming Abolitionists
In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter the call for the abolition of the police became a central demand for the movement. In this extraordinary, rev...
Cities of Power
In this brilliant, very original survey of the politics and meanings of urban landscapes, leading sociologist Göran Therborn offers a tour of the world’s major capital cities, and the forces that h...
Imperial Intimacies
‘Where are you from?’ was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post–World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh ...
The Concept of the Social
What does political agency mean for those who don’t know what to do or can’t be bothered to do it? This book develops a novel account of collective emancipation in which freedom is achieved not t...
Who Owns the Wind?
The energy transition has begun. To succeed – to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power – that process must be fair. Otherwise, mounting popular protest against wind farms will prolong ca...
An Event, Perhaps
Who was Jacques Derrida? For some, he is responsible, at least in part, for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic cri...
Behind Enemy Lies
In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Tur...
The Third Unconscious
The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it does not always remain the same. Different political and economic conditions transform the ...
The Walker
Can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy a...
Uncomputable
Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought the...
Daring to Hope
In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women’s liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and ...
The End of Policing
The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefr...
The Uses of Disorder
When first published in 1970, The Uses of Disorder, was a call to arms against the deadening hand of modernist urban planning upon the thriving chaotic city. Written in the aftermath of the 1968 st...
Portraits
John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artis...
Radio Benjamin

Radio Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the...
The Invention of the White Race
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the orig...
Prisoners of the American Dream
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...
The Clash of Fundamentalisms
The aerial attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, a global spectacle of unprecedented dimensions, generated an enormous volume of commentary. The inviolability of the American mainland...
The Making of New World Slavery
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—succes...
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...
The Origin of Capitalism
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...
Frames of War
In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prose...
Imagined Communities
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...
Beyond Black and White
Many in the US, including Barack Obama, have called for a 'post-racial' politics: yet race still divides the country politically, economically and socially.In this highly acclaimed work, Manning Ma...

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