Verso Book Club: September and October picks
Receive ALL of our new ebooks every month as well as one or more new books in the mail. Now at a discount of 50% to celebrate Verso’s 50th year, all subscribers will also get 50% off ALL of our books.
In our 50th year, we are excited to announce the Verso Book Club! Join now and get every new ebook that we publish, as well as one or more new books in the mail if you choose a print subscription. All Book Club members will also get 50% off everything on our website, for as long as you are a subscriber. To celebrate our 50th year of radical publishing and the launch of our book club, each member tier is 50% off for the first three months.
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 the occasional classic from Verso’s backlist). Learn more about the different member options here.
Every month we’ll offer a carefully curated selection of our best new titles, across a wide range of topics and subject areas, to bring you books that everyone at Verso regards as essential reading. In mid-July, we’ll email all members with more details about the August book club selection—including a letter from the editor—so that you can choose which one you want to receive, any time before the end of the month.
SEPTEMBER Book Club Selection
Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin. In this compelling new book, Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual, and Robert Pollin, a renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change—and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Green New Deal. Together, Chomsky and Pollin show how the forecasts for a hotter planet strain the imagination: vast stretches of the Earth will become uninhabitable, plagued by extreme weather, drought, rising seas, and crop failure. Arguing against the misplaced fear of economic disaster and unemployment arising from the transition to a green economy, they show how this bogus concern encourages climate denialism.
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell. Glitch Feminism is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilises and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work.
Verso Comrades will also receive:
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century by Andreas Malm. The economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented. Governments have spoken of being at war and find themselves forced to seek new powers in order to maintain social order and prevent the spread of the virus. If the state can mobilize itself in the face of an invisible foe like this pandemic, it should also be able to confront visible dangers such as climate destruction with equal force. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line.
Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care – childcare, healthcare, elder care – to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way. The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.
The Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney. In this classic work published in the heady days of anti-colonial revolution, Groundings with My Brothers follows the global circulation of emancipatory ideas, from the black students of North America to the Rasta counterculture of Jamaica and beyond. Having inspired a generation of revolutionaries, this new edition will re-introduce the book to a new political landscape that it helped shape, with reflections from leading scholar-activists.
All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
[book-strip index="1" style="display"]
OCTOBER Book Club Selection
Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
The Verso Book of Feminism: Revolutionary Words from Four Millennia of Rebellion edited by Jessie Kindig. The book shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China’s Tang Dynasty to accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus’s expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote to the revolutionary pétroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first-century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the sixth century and the nineteenth century to radical queer politics in the twentieth and twenty-first.
A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance by Stella Dadzie. Aside from Mary Prince, enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there’s no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you’ll find race, skin colour and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. Moreover, the evidence points to a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance—a role that was not just central, but downright dynamic.
Verso Comrades will also receive:
An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon. Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.
The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida. The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future. The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. Derrida’s thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future.
Verso Notebook. Following on the success of the Verso diary, Verso are now launching a new, beautifully designed notebook. Inspired by the original covers of New Left Book, the notebook is fully lined in the signature Verso red and in a handy portable size. Adding some radical to your writing.
All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
[book-strip index="2" style="display"]
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!
