Reading list

Verso Gift Guide

Books to ignite radical ideas.

Verso Books20 November 2022

Verso Gift Guide

Be inspired this year with our gift guide! Share, with your loved ones, radical and visionary thinking that interrogates existing ideas, and re-imagines a different kind of world.

Don't forget, we have bundled ebooks with every print purchase (where available) — meaning you can gift the print book (if you want to) and start reading the ebook straight away!

 

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Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. 

This unconventional history of homosexuality is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.

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Our best-selling radical diary! Alongside illustrations and book excerpts, it features significant radical dates from throughout history—such as landmark events of the English Civil War and the Black Panther movement, the protests of 1968, and milestones in women’s emancipation. Entries touch on the lives of revolutionaries, including Angela Davis, Rosa Luxemburg, and Martin Luther King Jr.

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"What if we could do better than the family?" is a question many find asking themselves over the festive period.

For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. 

Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

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A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops betweenmother and daughter, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controversial modern classic, Will and Testament.

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A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel”.

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An absurdist novel about fame, culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns from the author of The Superrationals.

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A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite - and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world.

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What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? Leslie Kern, author of the best selling Feminist City, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times.

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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, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

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In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle for social justice.

*only available from Verso in North America

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A previously unpublished collection of Rodney’s essays on race, colonialism and Marxism.

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Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, Ben Tarnoff argues that the solution is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people.

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Road to Nowhere exposes the flaws in Silicon Valley’s Uber-centric vision of the future of transportation. Instead, Paris Marx offers a vision for a more collective way of organizing transportation systems that considers the needs of poor, marginalized, and vulnerable people.

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A radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic politics.

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A haunting, intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.

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In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance - time, proximity, space, motion and tone - into text.

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A plan to win for the British left, from the co-founder of Momentum.

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How the first major leftwing generation since the sixties has shaped electoral politics.

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This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

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Winning the climate struggle will require an internationalist approach based on planetary working-class solidarity. Matthew Huber explains how.

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Katherine Angel's critically-acclaimed analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality.

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Against Borders is a passionate manifesto for border abolition, arguing that we must transform society and our relationships to one another, and build a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay.

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The lives of five socialist women and their legacy for modern-day feminists.

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A coruscating portrait of Britain’s greatest imperialist.

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

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A sweeping and nuanced materialist history of Western political thought.

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How did we come to live in a world dominated by big tech and finance?

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Chosen as one of the best Architecture and Design books of 2022 by The Financial Times and one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper

How statues, heritage and the built environment have become the battleground for the culture wars.

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With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning debut brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City.

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The first English-language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon.

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Why resisting climate change means combatting the fossil fuel industry.

 

 

Bad Gays
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 ...
Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner 2023
The 2023 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 ...
Abolish the Family
What if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonmen...
Is Mother Dead

Is Mother Dead

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...
Health Communism
In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing th...
I Fear My Pain Interests You
Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New ...
Cannibal Capitalism
Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for e...
Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies
What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the mo...
Abolition Geography
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...
The Transgender Issue
In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle ...
Decolonial Marxism

Decolonial Marxism

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...
Internet for the People
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...
Road to Nowhere
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that technology will revolutionize our cities and the ways we move around. Autonomous vehicles will make us safer, greener, and more efficient. On-demand servi...
Owning the Future
The question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset...
Radius
In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace. This is the sto...
The Choreography of Everyday Life
In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance—time, proximity, space, motion and tone— into text. As we follo...
Our Bloc
In Our Bloc, Momentum co-founder James Schneider lays out an action plan for the British left. To move from defeatism to renewed confidence, he proposes a Left Bloc: an explicit alliance of sociali...
The Rise of a New Left
A new progressive generation is on the rise in the United States, reflected in the mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America (90,000 mostly twentysomething members), Marxist explain...
Scorched Earth
Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for NonfictionIn this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality...
Climate Change as Class War
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As ...
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
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...
Against Borders
Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveilla...
Red Valkyries
Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...
Winston Churchill
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...
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

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...
A Social History of Western Political Thought
In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines th...
Hegemony Now
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?We cannot change anything until we have a better unders...
Monumental Lies
The past is weaponised in culture wars and cynically edited by those who wish to impose their ideology upon the physical spaces around us. Holocaust deniers use details of the ruins of the gas cha...
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 ...
Terminal Boredom

Terminal Boredom

On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently int...
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

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