Verso Book Club: April, May, June
Receive ALL of our new ebooks every month as well as one or more new books in the mail. Support Verso's radical publishing by becoming a book club subscriber!
Note: We've made some improvements to the backend of the Verso Book Club that will lead to improved functionality for book club members. Alongside these updates, we also renamed the "Verso Subscriber" tier. It will now be referred to as "Verso Partisan," an homage to the historical Partisan cafe in London.
The Verso Book Club offers our readers the chance to get the most essential books that we publish each month and the steady support allows us the security to keep expanding our revolutionary publishing program.
Every month we’ll offer a carefully curated selection of our best new titles; this spring we have a new short story collection from Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki, essays from writer Adam Shatz, political analysis from Cedric G. Johnson, and political theory from Isabelle Garo, Kristin Ross, and Sita Balani.
Each month we email all members with more details about next month's book club selections—including a letter from the editor—so that you can choose which one you want to receive.
You can choose between three options: the Verso Reader digital subscription, Verso Partisan for print and digital, and Verso Comrade to receive even more books in the mail. Learn more about the different member options here. All Book Club members will also get 50% off everything on our website.
April Book Club Selection
Verso Partisans and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
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Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations by Isabelle Garo. Instead of locking the perspective of emancipation into the registers of utopia, or relegating it to the side of an empty populism, Isabelle Garo studies in this book the conditions of a contemporary revival of the alternative as a collective construction, anchored in real aspirations and struggles and inseparable from a rethinking of the theoretical work. By addressing the impasses faced by many of the most fashionable radical theorists - Badiou, Laclau, the theorists of the commons, and revisiting them in relation to Marx and Gramsci also allows us to re-read the latter from the point of view of contemporary questions of the state and the party, of work and property, of conflict and hegemony.
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Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki and translated from Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan. A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; idle high school students find adventure in another dimension but aren't all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.
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Verso Comrades will also receive:
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Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World by Brett Christophers. As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on “asset manager society.” Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them. |
All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
MAY Book Club Selection
Verso Partisans and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
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Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination by Adam Shatz. Writers and Missionaries interrogates the major figures of twentieth and twenty-first century thought and finds within their lives and work the roots of our present intellectual and geopolitical situation. Charting the role of the committed intellectual through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre on the Algerian War and Edward Said's lifelong solidarity with the Palestinian people, to Fouad Ajami's role as the "native informant" for pro-intervention cause in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, alongside philosophers and critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the novelists Michel Houllebecq and Richard Wright, each struggled to reconcile their writing and their politics, their thought and their commitments. |
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The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross. The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross’s attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction, all the way to the forms taken by collective political action in the territorial struggles of today. If everyday life is, as many have come to believe, the ideal vantage point for an analysis of the social, it is also the crucial first step in its transformation. |
Verso Comrades will also receive:
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Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race 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 in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and essential: sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race. |
All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
JUNE Book Club Selection
Verso Partisans and Verso Comrades can choose their Book Club mailing from these two titles:
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What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani. What is "racial capitalism" and how do we overcome it? This sharp, slim, revelatory book argues that we misunderstand contemporary capitalism if we miss the centrality of racism to neoliberalism. From David Harvey to Wendy Brown, the leading scholars of neoliberalism's rise treat racism as an ornamental feature of recent capitalist politics—an ugly ornament, to be sure, but not one that is central to neoliberalism. In crisp, accessible prose and via descriptions of some key moments of modern history in the US and the UK, Arun Kundnani argues that this misapprehension of the role of race in neoliberalism contributes to the Left’s inability to build a successful movement connecting race and class. |
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Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Júnior. Heralded as the most important Brazilian novel of the century so far, this bestseller's unique blend of magic and social realism won it three literary awards and global acclaim. Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. |
Verso Comrades will also receive:
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Bodies Under Siege: How the Far–Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global by Sian Norris. Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements are largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today's feminist and left movements. As investigative journalist Sian Norris goes undercover at anti-abortion activist meetings, and pieces together the money trail linking American think tanks to far-right fascist groups, she maps out the pipeline by which fascism has become respectable across the Global North by taking away women's reproductive rights and autonomy. |
All Book Club members will also receive these new ebooks:
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SIGN UP TO THE VERSO BOOK CLUB HERE.
Learn more about the Verso Book Club—including more detailed information on all the membership tiers. Confused or have any questions? We hope our FAQs will help, but you can also email us at bookclub@versobooks.com—we would love to get your feedback!
