Reading list

Read what’s on your favourite writers’ bookshelves

Books endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and more!

18 December 2024

Read what’s on your favourite writers’ bookshelves

Want to widen your reading lists in the New Year? Read your favourite authors’ favorite authors.

These books will allow you to dive deeper into the politics, histories, and genres you’re already interested in, and expand your horizons with books endorsed by the best.

Verso Books End of Year Sale
November 18 - January 1
10% off when you buy two books or more
20% off when you buy four books or more
30% off when you buy six books or more
Discount will be applied in cart.

See our Christmas shipping cut-off dates, for each region, here.

All print books come with a free edition of the ebook (where available) — meaning that if you buy a book for a friend, you'll be able to download a digital version for yourself!

Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm is a revolutionary climate activist, and author of the best-selling How to Blow Up a Pipeline. He wants you to read:

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Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti’s seminal works, How Should a Person Be? (2010) and Motherhood (2018), examine love, grief, maternity, and desire. And she describes Vigdis Hjorth as ‘one of [her] favorite contemporary writers.’

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Judith Butler

Butler is one of the most widely read philosophers on the planet and the most influential voice in contemporary gender theory. They want you to read:

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Jeremy Corbyn

Independent MP and former leader of the UK Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn wants you to read Shattered Nation by Danny Dorling, saying Dorling's “final words – in a wonderfully hopeful conclusion – is that essentially it is up to us, all of us, to argue for a society that really does care for all, and challenge the media narrative that there is no alternative.”

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Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser's many groundbreaking contributions to Marxism and feminism make her a legendary figure on the left. She wants you to read:

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Angela Davis

Angela Davis is one of America’s giants of black radicalism and prison abolition. She wants you to read Miss Major Speaks, saying “The extraordinary insights in this book allow us to understand how liberation movements for trans, queer and other routinely marginalized people can hold the most emancipatory potential for all.”

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Robin D G Kelley

Kelley's work has explored the history of social movements in the US, the African diaspora, and Black intellectuals, among other things. He wants you to read:

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Edward Said

Edward Said, a Palestinian exile and author of the groundbreaking work Orientalism, wanted you to read Mural by Mahmoud Darwish: “Darwish’s poetry is an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.”

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Terry Eagleton

Eagleton is a foundational Marxist literary critic, and author of Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which has sold over 750,000 copies. He wants you to read the works of Fredric Jameson who he described as “without doubt the greatest cultural critic of his time.”

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Naomi Klein

Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and bestselling author of  Doppelganger (2023). She wants you to read Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, “Wind’s rigorous and jaw-dropping research reveals countless ways that the [Israel’s] education institutions are utterly entangled in the violent machinery of Palestinian dispossession and military bombardment.”

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Disaster Nationalism
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...
Future of Denial
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...
Crude Capitalism
This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as 'prize' or 'curse',...
If Only

If Only

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the m...
Democracy in the Political Present
‘Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.’I...
The Care Manifesto
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 careless...
The Storyteller
The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illumi...
Shattered Nation
Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further...
Taking Back Control?

Taking Back Control?

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...
Overshoot
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...
A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse
When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...
Miss Major Speaks
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the H...
The Jewelers of the Ummah
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...
Late Fascism
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 ...
Mistaken Identity
Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history’s most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common grou...
Mural

Mural

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...
Inventions of a Present
A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best...
The Years of Theory
Fredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lect...
A Singular Modernity
The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jameson—perhaps the m...
Towers of Ivory and Steel
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, ...