Verso Book Club: November and December 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-November, we’ll email all members with more details about the December book club selections—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.
In December, we've selected the best books we published from the first part of the year plus Comrades will get our brand-new "Comrade" canvas tote bag.
SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
NOVEMBER Book Club Selection
Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
Automation 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 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 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 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.
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!
DECEMBER Book Club Selection
Verso Subscribers and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution edited by Breanne Fahs. In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto—raging and wanting, quarreling and provoking—has always played a central role in feminism, and it’s the angry, brash feminism we need now.
Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth and translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Ellinor, a thirty-five-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 in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she’s ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.
Verso Comrades will also receive:
Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula by Laleh Khalili. The story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Arabian peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is an account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.
The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim. This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent should be in the arsenal of every rebel who understands that words and ideas are the ultimate weapons.
Verso Tote Bag 2020 from Verso Books. Calling all comrades! In our 50th year we are delighted to bring you this Verso canvas bag–big enough to carry around Lefebvre's 900-page Critique of Everyday Life, and sturdy enough to stash a milkshake. On one side is the word COMRADE in elongated black type and on the other side is the Verso logo in black type in the bottom corner. Beautifully designed, hardy and designed to last, we hope you love these bags as much as we do!
