Reading list

Verso Ebook Bestsellers

For a limited time only: ebooks are 60% off!

Verso Books27 November 2024

The Verso End-of-Year Sale just got even better! Until December 2nd, all our ebooks are 60% off. See our bestselling ebooks below, all our new books here, and our reading lists (including Gift Guide and 2024 Publishing Highlights).

Up to 30% off on our print books remains until January 1st, 2025.

Verso Ebook Bestsellers

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Power Games

by Jules Boykoff

Foreword by Dave Zirin

The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event’s nineteenth-century origins, through the Games’...

Burnout

by Hannah Proctor

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that que...

Overshoot

by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm

The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming – just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of c...

Disaster Nationalism

by Richard Seymour

The rise of the new far right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bol...

Mutual Aid

by Dean Spade

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...

How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism

by Cédric Durand

Translated by David Broder

The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn’t deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever. In ...

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...

The Killing of Gaza

by Gideon Levy

Translated by David B. Green

Gideon Levy is one of the most respected critics of Israel's apartheid policies against the Palestinian people. He is the outspoken award-winning journalist who has been writing on the conflict for...

The Automatic Fetish

by Beverley Best

The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central thr...

Towers of Ivory and Steel

by Maya Wind

Afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley

Foreword by Nadia Abu El Haj

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, ...

Against Landlords

by Nick Bano

Housing means prosperity and security for some; poverty, precarity and sickness for others. More people live in private rented accommodation than ever before, and rents rise without apparent reason...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

The Eye of the Master

by Matteo Pasquinelli

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as i...

Ten Myths About Israel

by Ilan Pappe

In this groundbreaking book, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel. This h...

Marxist Modernism

by Gillian Rose

Afterword by Martin Jay

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...

Happy Apocalypse

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Broder

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact h...

The Palestine Laboratory

by Antony Loewenstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingShortlisted for the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territ...

Late Fascism

by Alberto Toscano

The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great ...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

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...

A Social History of Western Political Thought

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

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...

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

by Andreas Malm

Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted ...

Future of Denial

by Tad DeLay

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timel...

Late Capitalism

by Ernest Mandel

Introduction by Cédric Durand

Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine ...

Nuclear is Not the Solution

by M.V. Ramana

THE CLIMATE CRISIS has propelled nuclear energy back into fashion. Its proponents argue we already have the technology of the future and that it only needs perfection and deployment. Nuclear Is Not...

The Reckoning

by Robin Blackburn

The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...

Disordered Attention

by Claire Bishop

The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over...

New Radical Enlightenment

by Marina Garcés

Translated by Julie Wark

Philosophy was born out of discussion, out of the rivalry between world views. From the philosophical ferment of the Enlightenment arose the idea of emancipation, a conflictual perspective which Ma...

Faraway the Southern Sky

by Joseph Andras

Translated by Simon Leser

Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, t...

Black Meme

by Legacy Russell

In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and co...

Half-Earth Socialism

by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese

‘Building a society that operates within ecological constraints requires an unleashing of our political imaginations, and this book helps us do just that’—Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecur...

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

by Jules Gill-Peterson

“A beautifully written and argued book.” - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, BabyThere is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one fri...

The Last Sane Woman

by Hannah Regel

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. Ther...

Mural

by Mahmoud Darwish

Introduction by John Berger

Translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami

Mural is the testimony of one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.Mahmoud Darwish was the unofficial laureate of Palestine. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his w...

The States of the Earth

by Mohamed Amer Meziane

Translated by Jonathan Adjemian

While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand...

On Extinction

by Ben Ware

On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching...

The Commune Form

by Kristin Ross

When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles ...

The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...

The New Faces of Fascism

by Enzo Traverso

What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of viol...

Learning from the Enemy

by Marco Bresciani

When democracy is under threat from authoritarianism, models of resistance must come to the fore. Giustizia e Libertà, founded by the Italian thinker and activist Carlo Rosselli in 1929, is one int...

Moral Abdication

by Didier Fassin

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Wes...

Disputing Disaster

by Perry Anderson

In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson picks out from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the conflagration: Fr...

Set My Heart on Fire

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Helen O'Horan

Hope I’m in for a good time, I thought. Even if it’s just for tonight.Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenti...

Taking Back Control?

by Wolfgang Streeck

Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz

The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centra...

You Can't Please All

by Tariq Ali

The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to w...

Perdita

by Dylan Riley

“Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair.” When Dy...

Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied

by Patrick Cockburn

Radical journalist Claud Cockburn fought successfully against the political and media establishment, writing for publications as varied as The Times and Private Eye. To Graham Greene, he was the gr...

Multitudes

by Dan Hancox

Despite what politicians, philosophers and the press have long told us, every peaceful crowd is not a violent mob in waiting. Dan Hancox argues it is time to rethink long-held assumptions about cro...

The Years of Theory

by Fredric Jameson

Edited by Carson Welch

Fredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lect...

The Jewelers of the Ummah

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...

Loot

by Adam Raz

Translated by Philip Hollander

During the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.Tens of...

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