A look at Verso's series
Key titles from across Verso's many series and imprints.
A collection of our most popular titles in Verso's many series and imprints.
To celebrate our 50th anniversary we have 50% off all our Book Club memberships and 40% off ALL BOOKS! However, if you do sign up for our book club then you will get 50% off everything on our site for as long as you are a member.
We have lots more reading lists to help navigate our entire catalog of books here!
FICTION IMPRINT
A new series of uncompromisingly intelligent and beautiful books with an international focus.
Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman’s struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth’s novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.
FEMINIST CLASSICS
Rediscover pioneering works of feminism from leading writers including Kathi Weeks, Vron Ware, and Michele Wallace.
Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]The Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting their day-to-day struggles, their experiences of education, work and health care, and the personal and political struggles they have waged to preserve a sense of identity and community.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East.
RADICAL THINKERS
Beautifully designed important works of theory and philosophy, including Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, and many more.
Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]On Ideology charts Althusser’s critique of the theoretical system unveiled in his own major works, and his developing practice of philosophy as a “revolutionary weapon.”
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]Erica Benner identifies arguments in Marx and Engels’ writings that can help us to think more clearly about national identity and conflict today.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis’s incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]Part essay, part autobiography, Darkwater explicitly addresses significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prosecutes its wars. In doing so, she calls for a reconceptualization of the left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of interventionist military action.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]Women, Resistance and Revolution is an invaluable historical study, as well as a trove of anecdote and example fit to inspire today’s generation of feminist thinkers and activists.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]Freud and the Non-European builds on Said’s abiding interest in the psychoanalyst’s work to examine Freud’s assumption that Moses was an Egyptian and from there explore the limits of identity.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]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. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future.
JACOBIN SERIES
Published in collaboration with Jacobin magazine, these books offer short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective.
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden exposes the forgotten history of Joe Biden, one of the United States’ longest-serving politicians, and one of its least scrutinized.
[book-strip index="17" style="buy"]The profound forces of all-American nativism have, in fact, been pushing politics so far to the right over the last forty years that, for many people, Trump began to look reasonable. As Daniel Denvir argues, issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism.
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.
[book-strip index="19" style="buy"]In Playing the Whore, sex workers' demands, too long relegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work is work, and sex workers' rights are human rights.
VERSO FUTURES
Contemporary philosophical and political interventions by writers and thinkers from around the world.
In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.
[book-strip index="21" style="buy"]What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? In his most unsettling book to date, Franco “Bifo” Berardi embarks on an exhilarating journey through philosophy, psychoanalysis and current events, searching for the social roots of the mental malaise of our age.
WORLD HISTORY SERIES
Classic works of global history, from the Ancient World to the present day.
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery.
[book-strip index="23" style="buy"]Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history.
[book-strip index="24" style="buy"]In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a “modern” state and political culture in Continental Europe, signaled the persistence of pre-capitalist social property relations.
REVOLUTIONS SERIES
Classic texts by leading revolutionaries set ablaze by contemporary radical writers.
Composed in 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman broke new ground in its demand for women’s education. A Vindication remains one of history’s most important and elegant broadsides against sexual oppression.
[book-strip index="26" style="buy"]Written in the white heat of revolutionary Russia’s Civil War, Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism is one of the most potent defenses of revolutionary dictatorship. In his provocative commentary to this new edition the philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that Trotsky’s attack on the illusions of liberal democracy has a vital relevance today.
[book-strip index="27" style="buy"]Robespierre’s defence of the French Revolution remains one of the most powerful and unnerving justifications for political violence ever written.
PAMPHLET SERIES
Short, low-priced, and focused political essays.
Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.
[book-strip index="29" style="buy"]The global political, ecological, economic, and social breakdown—symbolized by Trump’s election—has destroyed faith that neoliberal capitalism is beneficial to the majority. Nancy Fraser explores how this faith was built through the late twentieth century by balancing two central tenets: recognition (who deserves rights) and distribution (who deserves income).
VOICE OF WITNESS SERIES
Illuminating critical issues through the personal stories of underrepresented people across the world.
Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States. Here, in their own words, thirteen narrators recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once inside.
[book-strip index="31" style="buy"]This book of oral histories makes the reality of farm work visible in accounts of hardship, bravery, solidarity, and creativity in California’s fields, as real people struggle to win new opportunities for future generations.
