Cleveland Review of Books: Verso Reading List

Book strip #1

• 

  Minima Moralia

  by Theodor Adorno

  Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

  Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...
• 

  Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

  by Katherine Angel

  Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And m...
• 

  City of Quartz

  by Mike Davis

  No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...
• 

  architect, verb.

  by Reinier De Graaf

  No longer does it suffice to judge a building solely by its appearance; it must be measured and certified. When architects talk about ‘Excellence’, ‘Sustainability’, ‘Well-being’, ‘Liveability’, ‘P...
• 

  The Function of Criticism

  by Terry Eagleton

  This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a “public sphere” in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the...
• 

  Quick Fixes

  by Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong

  This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the boar...
• 

  Long Live the Post Horn!

  by Vigdis Hjorth

  Translated by Charlotte Barslund

  Ellinor, a 35-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 i...
• 

  Paradise Rot

  by Jenny Hval

  Translated by Marjam Idriss

  "As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder."Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickJo is in a strange new country for university and havi...
• 

  Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World

  by Kumari Jayawardena

  Foreword by Rafia Zakaria

  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 Midd...
• 

  The Politics of Time

  by Peter Osborne

  If Aristotle sought to understand time through change, might we not reverse the procedure and seek to understand change through time? Once we do this, argues Peter Osborne, it soon becomes clear th...
• 

  Judaism and Modernity

  by Gillian Rose

  Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime ‘other’ of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deco...
• 

  Duty Free Art

  by Hito Steyerl

  In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the worl...
• 

  Hit Parade of Tears

  by Izumi Suzuki

  Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O'Horan

  A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of t...