The Year in 10 Books
From escapism to the end of policing, we bring you 10 books that have defined this strange year.
We have bundled ebooks with every print purchase (see below) — meaning you can gift the print book (if you want to!) and start reading the ebook straight away!
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]For the year in which the world of work was turned on its head.... a consensus-shattering account of automation technologies and their effect on workplaces and the labor market.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]Because everyone needs some escapism.
At once a time-travelling horror story and a fugue-like feminist manifesto, this is a singular, genre-warping new novel from the author of the acclaimed Paradise Rot.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]CORONAVIRUS PAMPHLET SERIES
The global pandemic may be a crisis in itself, but it has also revealed and exacerbated huge existing inequalities. Capitalism is more broken than ever before, and our climate emergency deepens further.
Our Coronavirus pamphlet series is our response to multiple unfolding and connected crises, from leading writers and activists. In these books we look at capitalism, the economy, care, the climate, mutual aid, and more. These short books are necessary and vital reading as we struggle to comprehend the world around us.
In The Corona Crash, leading economics commentator Grace Blakeley theorises about the epoch-making changes that the coronavirus brings in its wake.
BACK IN STOCK IN THE US AND CANADA ON DEC 22
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]What does the COVID 19 tell us about the climate breakdown, and what should we do about it? In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line. He offers proposals on how the climate movement should use this present emergency to make that case. There can be no excuse for inaction any longer.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.
BACK IN STOCK IN THE US AND CANADA ON DEC 17
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]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 carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]Walking. Maybe you have done more of it this year, maybe you have struggled to make those steps. Either way, you are probably more familar with the streets around where you live than ever before.
From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]In a year where we have spent more time on the internet than any other.... a new manifesto for cyberfeminism.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. What must we do to work out who we are, and where we belong? How do we find the space to grow, unite and confront the systems of oppression? Glitch Feminism is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women’s bodies and women’s lives. Through the pandemic we have seen gendered inequality rise, as the personal has become more political than ever before.
The Verso Book of Feminism is an unprecedented collection of feminist voices from four millennia of global history. It chronicles a feminist history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]"It’s been almost six years since the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, and little has changed in how poor communities of color are being policed. It’s time to rethink superficial and ineffective procedural police reforms and move to defund the police instead." - Alex Vitale.
The End of Policing is a book that we published originally in 2017 that has become crucial and necessary reading year.
The problem is not overpolicing, it is policing itself.
******
