Essential reads on how capital influences and forms our intimate relationships.

How can we build resilient communities in the era of polycrisis? How can we do better than the family? And how can we can harness the liberatory possibilities of love?

As a friendly reminder: Verso Book Club members enjoy 50% off all titles year-round on purchases of any size. It's a great deal and the best way to support radical publishing!

You Can't Choose Your Family:

Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. What if we could do better?

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Sex, Desire, and Consent:

Politics exists in the mess of life. Sex does too, and so must sexual politics, to make any sense at all.

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Red Love:

When we organise together and in solidarity with one another, when we take care of each other, another world is possible.

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They Call It Love

by Alva Gotby

They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the femi...

Abolish the Family

by Sophie Lewis

What if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonmen...

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

by Friedrich Engels

Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock

In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropologica...

Daddy Issues

by Katherine Angel

In this searching, elegant essay, critically acclaimed writer Katherine Angel examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture with her characteristic mix of boldness and nuance, asking how th...

Full Surrogacy Now

by Sophie Lewis

"Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on...

Is Mother Dead

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...

Love and Money, Sex and Death

by McKenzie Wark

After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relati...

Deadly and Slick

by Sita Balani

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...

Bad Gays

by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have ...

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

by Katherine Angel

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And m...

What We Don't Talk About

by JoAnn Wypijewski

What if we took sex out of the box marked ‘special’, either the worst or best thing that a human person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of reality? In this extraordinary boo...

Burn It Down!

by Breanne Fahs

Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to acti...

Lifehouse

by Adam Greenfield

A Lifehouse is an institution at the heart of each neighborhood that responds to the terrifying reality of climate collapse in our own communities.In this book Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Te...

Lean on Me

by Lynne Segal

Have you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades?Questions of care, intimacy, educatio...

Miss Major Speaks

by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek

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...

Red Valkyries

by Kristen Ghodsee

Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...

Set Fear on Fire

by LASTESIS

After the feminist art collective LASTESIS created their performance "A Rapist in Your Path" in their native Chile, it went viral across the globe, becoming the anthem of the grassroots feminist mo...

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...

The Care Manifesto

by The Care Collective

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 Politics of Friendship

by Jacques Derrida

Translated by George Collins

Jacques Derrida was one of most influential philosophers of the 20th century. In The Politics of Friendship he explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future in ord...

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