Verso Books 2024 Highlights

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...

The Price is Wrong

by Brett Christophers

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently pr...

Nuclear is Not the Solution

by M.V. Ramana

THE CLIMATE CRISIS has propelled nuclear energy back into fashion. Its proponents argue we already have the technology of the future and that it only needs perfection and deployment. Nuclear Is Not...

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...

Happy Apocalypse

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Broder

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact h...

The States of the Earth

by Mohamed Amer Meziane

Translated by Jonathan Adjemian

While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand...

Future of Denial

by Tad DeLay

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...

Chaos in the Heavens

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences o...

Ten Myths About Israel

by Ilan Pappe

In this groundbreaking book, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel. This h...

The Killing of Gaza

by Gideon Levy

Translated by David B. Green

Gideon Levy is one of the most respected critics of Israel's apartheid policies against the Palestinian people. He is the outspoken award-winning journalist who has been writing on the conflict for...

Loot

by Adam Raz

Translated by Philip Hollander

During the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.Tens of...

Towers of Ivory and Steel

by Maya Wind

Afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley

Foreword by Nadia Abu El Haj

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, ...

Hollow Land

by Eyal Weizman

A Child in Palestine

by Naji al-Ali

Introduction by Joe Sacco

A Child in Palestine collects the work of one of the Arab world’s greatest cartoonists, Naji al-Ali, known as ‘the Palestinian Malcolm X’. Discovered in the 1950s, he was revered throughout the reg...

The Holocaust Industry

by Norman G. Finkelstein

In his iconoclastic and controversial study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in global culture to a disturbing examination of Holocau...

Mural

by Mahmoud Darwish

Introduction by John Berger

Translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami

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...

In Search of Fatima

by Ghada Karmi

Born in Jerusalem, Ghada Karmi and her family were forced out of their home in 1948. They shared the fate of the thousands of Palestinians who, in the Nakba, were dispossessed and driven from land ...

Moral Abdication

by Didier Fassin

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Wes...

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

by Andreas Malm

Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted ...

Disaster Nationalism

by Richard Seymour

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...

Democracy or Bonapartism

by Domenico Losurdo

Foreword by Luciano Canfora

Translated by David Broder

The history of universal suffrage is best understood as a conflict between liberal elites and democractic workers’ movements, according to Domenico Losurdo. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued th...

This Fiction Called Nigeria

by Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous coun...

The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy

by Kjell Östberg

Historian Kjell Östberg presents the first comprehensive study of one of the most influential political movements of our time. Swedish Social Democracy was an inspiration to young socialists around...

Learning from the Enemy

by Marco Bresciani

When democracy is under threat from authoritarianism, models of resistance must come to the fore. Giustizia e Libertà, founded by the Italian thinker and activist Carlo Rosselli in 1929, is one int...

Multitudes

by Dan Hancox

Despite what politicians, philosophers and the press have long told us, every peaceful crowd is not a violent mob in waiting. Dan Hancox argues it is time to rethink long-held assumptions about cro...

Burnout

by Hannah Proctor

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that que...

The Commune Form

by Kristin Ross

When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles ...

Set My Heart on Fire

by Izumi Suzuki

Translated by Helen O'Horan

Hope I’m in for a good time, I thought. Even if it’s just for tonight.Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenti...

If Only

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

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...

The Last Sane Woman

by Hannah Regel

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. Ther...

Faraway the Southern Sky

by Joseph Andras

Translated by Simon Leser

Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, t...

Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

Translated by Marjam Idriss

"As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder."Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickJo is in a strange new country for university and havi...

Inventions of a Present

by Fredric Jameson

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...

What Is Cultural Criticism?

by Stefan Collini and Francis Mulhern

In What Is Cultural Criticism?, two leading critics grapple with problems of literature, politics and intellectual practice. The debate opens with Francis Mulhern’s account of what he terms ‘metacu...

Into the Melée

by Francis Mulhern

Into the Mêlée probes the mercurial relationship between culture and politics through versatile critical writing on Conrad, Orwell, Sartre, Raymond Williams and Roberto Schwarz, among others. The ‘...

Mimesis

by Valery Podoroga

Introduction by Ioulia Podoroga

Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker ...

Balzac's Paris

by Eric Hazan

In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a lovin...

You Can't Please All

by Tariq Ali

The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to w...

I, Rigoberta Menchú

by Rigoberta Menchú

Introduction by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

Edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

Translated by Ann Wright

Now a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. Menchú suffered gross i...

Perdita

by Dylan Riley

“Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair.” When Dy...

Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied

by Patrick Cockburn

Radical journalist Claud Cockburn fought successfully against the political and media establishment, writing for publications as varied as The Times and Private Eye. To Graham Greene, he was the gr...

Lula

by Fernando Morais

One of seven children raised in abject poverty by a single parent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva acquired his politics on the hard road of personal suffering, inspired by the selfless example of his mo...

Fragments against My Ruin

by Farrukh Dhondy

Born in Poona, India, Farrukh Dhondy came to England in 1964 and immersed himself in radical politics and the counterculture. He kicked off a career in journalism interviewing Pink Floyd and Allen ...

Paul Foot

by Margaret Renn

Paul Foot was one of the most influential investigative reporters of his generation. For nearly fifty years, he was the scourge of corrupt politicians and dodgy businessmen, a champion of the under...

On Extinction

by Ben Ware

On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching...

My Teaching

by Jacques Lacan

Preface by Jacques-Alain Miller

Translated by David Macey

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, and prefaced by Jacques-Alain Miller, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduct...

Marxist Modernism

by Gillian Rose

Afterword by Martin Jay

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...

New Radical Enlightenment

by Marina Garcés

Translated by Julie Wark

Philosophy was born out of discussion, out of the rivalry between world views. From the philosophical ferment of the Enlightenment arose the idea of emancipation, a conflictual perspective which Ma...

The World and Us

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

In The World and Us, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to reinvent philosophy. His central theme is our transcendence - everything in our existence points beyond itself - and its relation to our fi...

Abortion and Women's Choice

by Rosalind Petchesky

Foreword by Zillah Eisenstein

This prize-winning study is the definitive work on the politics of abortion and fertility. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky provides overwhelming evidence against the anti-abortion forces and in the proc...

How We Walk

by Matthew Beaumont

You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait r...

Autism Is Not A Disease

by Jodie Hare

Neurodiversity is one of the most urgent political issues of our time. As the number of diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and other types of neurodivergence rises, we are starting to understand that there...

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...

The Absence of Myth

by Georges Bataille

Translated by Michael Richardson

For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an ...

The Years of Theory

by Fredric Jameson

Edited by Carson Welch

Fredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lect...

Late Capitalism

by Ernest Mandel

Introduction by Cédric Durand

Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine ...

Engaging Erik Olin Wright

Contributions by Rina Agarwala, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Ruy Braga, Harry Brighouse, Michael Burawoy, H. Jacob Carlson, Rodolfo Elbert, Greta R. Krippner, Stephanie Luce, João Alexandre Peschanski, Peter Ramand, Gay Seidman, Kwang-Yeong Shin and Marta Soler-Gallart

Edited by Michael Burawoy and Gay Seidman

When the renowned social scientist Erik Olin Wright passed away in 2019 at the height of his intellectual powers, he left behind an unfinished project intended to forge a connection between class a...

The Automatic Fetish

by Beverley Best

The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central thr...

The Double Shift

by Jason Read

Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery—working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase...

The Reckoning

by Robin Blackburn

The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...

The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

by Andrew Drummond

'The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the mas...

Workshop of the World

by Raphael Samuel

Edited by John Merrick

‘ONE OF THE MOST OUTSTANDING, ORIGINAL INTELLECTUALS OF HIS GENERATION’, Stuart Hall, author of The Hard Road to RenewalThe work of the pioneering historian Raphael Samuel opened up new vistas of h...

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

by Jules Gill-Peterson

“A beautifully written and argued book.” - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, BabyThere is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one fri...

Black Meme

by Legacy Russell

In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and co...

Disputing Disaster

by Perry Anderson

In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson picks out from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the conflagration: Fr...

The Jewelers of the Ummah

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

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...

Leaving the Twentieth Century

by McKenzie Wark

The Situationist International, which leaped to the fore during the Paris tumult of 1968, has extended its revolutionary influence right up to the present day. In Leaving the Twentieth Century, the...

The Zone

by Justinien Tribillon

In The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh’s paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine,...

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume V

by Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott

Translated by Jacob Blumenfeld, Mathias Foit, Nicholas Gray, Henry Holland, Zachary King and Manuela Kölke

This volume is the first to contain all of Rosa Luxemburg’s eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918–19 German revolutions. Also contained here are articles, essays, and manuscripts on the Eu...

European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960

by Victor G. Kiernan

Foreword by Tariq Ali

European Empires from Conquest to Collapse is a vivid anticolonial reckoning with the history of imperial warfare. Global in scope, it deftly surveys the fighting forces and military engagements of...

Cultures in Babylon

by Hazel V. Carby

Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby’s most important and influential essays, Cultures in Babylon addresses the political dilemmas of representing Black women as sexual subjects...

Loved Egyptian Night

by Hugh Roberts

Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 an...

Towards the Abyss

by Volodymyr Ishchenko

Towards the Abyss presents searching analysis of a decade of war and upheaval in Ukraine. Volodymyr Ishchenko has been among the left’s most significant commentators on Ukraine since 2014, when pro...

Disordered Attention

by Claire Bishop

The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over...

Civil Imagination

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Translated by Louise Bethlehem

The photograph is not just an image but an event, one in the longer sequence of a photographic moment. Challenging given definitions of photography and of the political, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls...

Everything to Play For

by Marijam Did

Everything To Play For asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessib...

How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism

by Cédric Durand

Translated by David Broder

The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn’t deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever. In ...

Systems Ultra

by Georgina Voss

Systems Ultra explores how we experience complex systems: the mesh of things, people, and ideas interacting to produce their own patterns and behaviours.What does it mean when a car which runs on c...

Cyberboss

by Craig Gent

Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasi...

Bloody Panico!

by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The most successful political party in history?The Tory Party has been in power for eighty-five of the past 135 years. In 2019 they won their largest parliamentary majority in more than three decad...

Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?

by Leah Cowan

Every week it seems there is a fresh scandal involving abhorrent, racist, misogynist behaviour by police officers. Yet these are the very people women are supposed to approach for help when faced w...

The Vote

by Paul Foot

The culmination of a lifetime’s work by the celebrated journalist and historian Paul Foot, The Vote tells the thrilling story of how the universal franchise was secured in Britain, and the slow ero...

If... Stands Up

by Steve Bell

Steve Bell’s If… cartoon strip in the Guardian attracted generations of loyal readers. If… Stands Up is his hilarious commentary on the past six years of political madness.Unmissable highlights inc...

Blue-Collar Empire

by Jeff Schuhrke

Blue-Collar Empire tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO’s global anticommunist crusade—and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.Unions have the power not only to secure pay ...

Magical Urbanism

by Mike Davis

Foreword by Román de la Campa

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardA CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. ...

The Good Die Young

Introduction by Greg Grandin

Edited by Rene Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters

If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, Henry Kissinger is the specter haunting its dusty hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at pre...

The Jail is Everywhere

by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Judah Schept

Foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Nearly every county and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people into prisons and long-term incarceration. Jails ...

The Rest and the West

by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West locates the origins of this development in the turbulent dyn...

Taking Back Control?

by Wolfgang Streeck

Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz

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...

Crude Capitalism

by Adam Hanieh

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',...

The Fall and Rise of American Finance

by Scott Aquanno and Stephen Maher

The Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan’s vast empire to the rise of finance be...

The State and Revolution

by V. I. Lenin

Introduction by Antonio Negri

Lenin’s booklet The State and Revolution struck the world of Marxist theory like a lightning bolt. Written in the months running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional s...

Not By Politics Alone

by V. I. Lenin

Edited by Tamara Deutscher

This vivid selection, compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher, written by Lenin and those who knew him, brings us the revolution in his everyday life – the man who lived by politics but not by ...

Imperialism and the National Question

by V. I. Lenin

Introduction by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of th...

The Lenin Scenario

by Tariq Ali

Commissioned by Oliver Stone in 2015 to commemorate the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali’s captivating screenplay of the life and times of Vladimir Lenin puts flesh on the bones of the historical reco...

Lenin's Childhood

by Isaac Deutscher

Introduction by Tamara Deutscher and Gonzalo Pozo

When he died suddenly in 1967, Isaac Deutscher had completed only the compelling first chapter of a long-anticipated biography of Lenin, published here. It covers Lenin’s family background, birth a...

What Comes After Farce?

by Hal Foster

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order tha...

The Palestine Laboratory

by Antony Loewenstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingShortlisted for the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territ...

Our Lives in Their Portfolios

by Brett Christophers

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financia...

The Internet Con

by Cory Doctorow

When the tech platforms promised a future of "connection," they were lying. They said their "walled gardens" would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.The platforms locked us into their syste...

First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship

by Richard Lachmann

The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the U...

Revolution

by Enzo Traverso

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”: Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s sexua...

Shattered Nation

by Danny Dorling

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...

Work

by Andrea Komlosy

Translated by Loren Balhorn and Jacob Watson

Andrea Komlosy argues in this important intervention that, when we examine it closely, work changes its meanings according to different historical and regional contexts. Globalizing labour history ...