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Verso Book Club: October and November 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.

Verso Books20 October 2020

Verso Book Club: October and November picks

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. 

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:
 

The Verso Book of FeminismThe 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 BellyA 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, PerhapsAn 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 FriendshipThe 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 NotebookVerso 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:

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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!


NOVEMBER Book Club Selection

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

Automation and the Future of WorkAutomation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav. Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists and social critics have united in arguing that we are living on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work as we know it. But does the much-discussed “rise of the robots” really explain the jobs crisis that awaits us on the other side of the coronavirus? What social movements, he asks, are required to propel us into post-scarcity, if technological innovation alone can’t deliver it?
 

Feminist InternationalFeminist International: How to Change Everything by Verónica Gago. In this brilliant and kaleidoscopic look at the emerging feminist international, Verónica Gago uses the women’s strike as both a concept and a collective experience. At once a gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto, Feminist International draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class.



Verso Comrades will also receive:

Critical EncountersCritical Encounters: Capitalism, Democracy, Ideas by Wolfgang Streeck. From the acclaimed author of How Will Capitalism End? comes an omnibus of long-form critical essays engaging with leading economists and thinkers. Critical Encounters draws on Wolfgang Streeck’s inimitable writing for the London Review of Books and New Left Review, among other publications. It opens with treatments of two contrasting historical eras—factory capitalism and financialization—and three of the world’s major economies: the United States, France and Germany. A middle section surveys the hollowing out of Western democracies and reviews Yanis Varoufakis’s “strange but indispensable” memoir of the eurozone crisis.

The Corona CrashThe Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley. This crisis will tip us into a new era of monopoly capitalism, argues Blakeley, as the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and the tech giants grow to unprecedented proportions. We need a radical response. The recovery could see the transformation of our political, economic, and social systems based on the principles of the Green New Deal. If not, the alternatives, as Blakeley warns, may be even worse than we feared.


All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:

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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.

Old Gods, New Enigmas
Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an...
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...
Aesthetics and Politics
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...
Chavs
In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain's Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckles...
Culture and Materialism
A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founde...
Sexuality in the Field of Vision
A pivotal work in the history of feminism and a groundbreaking intervention into film theory, Sexuality in the Field of Vision is a brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminis...
The Notion of Authority

The Notion of Authority

In The Notion of Authority, written in the 1940s in Nazi-occupied France, Alexandre Kojève uncovers the conceptual premises of four primary models of authority, examining the practical application ...
Girls Against God

Girls Against God

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselv...
The Comrade from Milan

The Comrade from Milan

In this much-lauded memoir, acclaimed for its blend of literary elegance and political passion, Rossana Rossanda, a legendary figure on the Italian left, reflects on a life of radical commitment.Ac...
The Corona Crash
In The Corona Crash, leading economics commentator Grace Blakeley theorises about the epoch-making changes that the coronavirus brings in its wake. We are living through a unique moment in history...
Precarious Life
In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper un...
Post-Growth Living
The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposa...
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...
Futures of Socialism
British politics is in an extraordinary place. Grace Blakeley introduces an indispensable collection of analysis and comment.In Futures of Socialism, Sam Gindin and James Meadway reassess socialist...
Mutual Aid
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal imm...
The Benjamin Files
The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-p...
In Praise of Disobedience

In Praise of Disobedience

In Praise of Disobedience draw on works from a single miraculous year in which Oscar Wilde published the larger part of his greatest prose — the year he came into maturity as an artist. Before the ...
Post-Growth Living
The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposa...
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...
Allegory and Ideology
Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contra...
Futures of Socialism
British politics is in an extraordinary place. Grace Blakeley introduces an indispensable collection of analysis and comment.In Futures of Socialism, Sam Gindin and James Meadway reassess socialist...
How I Became A Socialist
William Morris is famous as a designer, poet and artist, but his work as a political thinker and activist is less well known. This collection, the first of his political writings published for near...
Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy
Classical liberalism regarded universal suffrage as a mortal threat to property. So what explains the advent of liberal democracy, and how stable today is the marriage between representative govern...
The Red Years
The analysis of May 68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan. It is also the pivo...
Rentier Capitalism
In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as ‘rentier cap...
The Common Wind
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...
Crippled
In austerity Britain, disabled people have been recast as worthless scroungers. From social care to the benefits system, politicians and the media alike have made the case that Britain’s 12 milli...
The Black Romantic Revolution
During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to...
The BBC
The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a libera...
Long Live the Post Horn!

Long Live the Post Horn!

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...
The Case for the Green New Deal
In 2008, the first Green New Deal was devised by Pettifor and a group of English economist and thinkers, but was ignored within the tumults of the financial crash. A decade later, the ideas was rev...
Hostile Environment
Longlisted for the 2019 Jhalak Prize. From the 1960s the UK’s immigration policy - introduced by both Labour and Tory governments - has been a toxic combination of racism and xenophobia. Maya Good...
The People Are Not an Image
The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted throughout the world not by television or even social media, bu...