The Past Is Erupting From The Surface | Verso Summer Reading

‘Historic’ and ‘unprecedented’ have lost all meaning, and when events are fast-moving it is all too easy for history to be rewritten. Following the BLM resurgence, people everywhere are challenging the distorted view of history we have been fed throughout our lives. The true shape of history is wrought by the struggles of those who participated in it!

These books illuminate histories that are largely unknown to most readers, and that polite society would happily have us forget — including the histories of the internet, police and incarceration, evil twinks, and the cult of Winston Churchill.

40% off everything on our site ends July 8th!

“History is written by the victors” — Winston Churchill*

 “Churchill was a plump carp happy to swim in the foulest of ponds as long as his own career and the needs of the Empire were fulfilled.”— Tariq Ali

*Churchill probably never said that and certainly didn’t come up with it— you get the idea.

Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it?

I could replace ‘history’ with ‘shitstory’. Shitstory is a story that doesn’t make sense, that is nonlinear, tautologous, trivial.

The past is still with us; the revolutions of the queer future beckon.

An extraordinary novel about one of history’s most reviled figures.

Out August 9

As the past lives so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that demand critical reflection on the region’s actual history, and its relation to social and political life today.

New collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration.

Captives’ is the definitive history of America’s most notorious jail, and the violent rise of New York City’s law-and-order movement.

The long history of protest confirms that dissent always returns despite attempts by the state to suppress it.

‘We as a party could decide the next four years of our history is for us.’— Sir Keir Starmer, 2019

Starmer originally pledged to revitalise Corbynism with a dose of lawyerly competence. To understand what happened afterwards, it is necessary to understand the man himself.

So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, politics, and everyday thinking, that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

We need a left analysis of American history and contemporary life that proceeds from a clearheaded sense of actually existing black life.

“The planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.” Originally published in French in 1974, d’Eaubonne first proposed a politics of ecofeminism.

As the call for a new understanding of our national history grows louder, Britain’s Empire turns the received imperial story on its head.

A personal history of life, love and women’s liberation.

The radical history of space exploration from the Russian Cosmists to Elon Musk.

The occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance sheet can be drawn.

A fascinating cultural history of this most magical of islands.

A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties.

Groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America.

A balance sheet of the twentieth century’s age of revolutions.

A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era.

An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis.

Further summer reading:

The Revolutions of the Future Beckon— 40% off all Autumn preorders!

Anti-Capitalist Queer Liberation: Reading List— We need to bring queer liberation back to its radical roots. 

Feminist Classics— Rediscover pioneering works of feminism throughout history.

Verso World History— Classic works of global history, from the Ancient World to the present day.

Winston Churchill

by Tariq Ali

The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson in his failing attempts to be magi...

Internet for the People

by Ben Tarnoff

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your pri...

Girl Online

by Joanna Walsh

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to a...

Bad Gays

by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have ...

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

by Olivier Guez

Translated by Georgia de Chamberet

For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through Sout...

The South

by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Foreword by Barbara J. Fields

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but ...

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...

Captives

by Jarrod Shanahan

Captives combines a thrilling narrative account of Rikers Island’s descent into infamy with a dramatic retelling of the last seventy years of New York and American politics from the vantage point o...

Charged

by Matt Foot and Morag Livingstone

Charged is an essential investigation into the role of policing protest in Britain today. As the UK government tries to suppress all forms of dissent, in their pursuit of more control, how do the p...

The Starmer Project

by Oliver Eagleton

Hailed as a human-rights champion and political outsider, what sort of politician is Keir Starmer really, and what mark is he making on the new politics of Labour? In The Starmer Project, Oliver Ea...

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...

The Panthers Can't Save Us Now

by Cedric G. Johnson

In the wake of the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd, nearly every major consumer brand proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad campaigns to match their Twe...

Feminism or Death

by Francoise d'Eaubonne

Translated by Ruth Hottell and Emma Ramadan

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but abo...

Britain's Empire

by Richard Gott

As the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain’s Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative ...

Daring to Hope

by Sheila Rowbotham

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 ...

Space Forces

by Fred Scharmen

Many societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there - whether conquering the unknown, establishing space "colonies," privatising the moon's resources -...

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been s...

The Invention of Sicily

by Jamie Mackay

Sicily is at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, and for over 2000 years has been the gateway between Europe, Africa and the East. It has long been seen as the frontier between Western Civilizatio...

Set the Night on Fire

by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...

The Invention of the White Race

by Theodore W. Allen

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...

Revolution

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 sexua...

The Common Wind

by Julius S. Scott

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of o...

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...