Reading list

Verso Gift Guide

Share radical ideas.

18 November 2024

Our 2024 Gift Guide: featuring our recently-launched Verso Gift Card, the best-selling Verso Radical Diary and Planner, and books that re-imagine a different world.

We have bundled ebooks with every print purchase (where available) — meaning you can gift the print book and start reading the ebook straight away!

Verso Gift Card

Our Gift Cards are available in $10, $25, $50 & $100 denominations and have no expiration date. See all our Gift Card options here.

Verso Gift Card

Share radical ideas with a Verso Gift Card. Our Gift Cards are available in $10, $25, $50 & $100 denominations and have no expiration date. All gift cards are digital and can only be redeemed...

Verso Gift Card

Share radical ideas with a Verso Gift Card. Our Gift Cards are available in $10, $25, $50 & $100 denominations and have no expiration date. All gift cards are digital and can only be redeemed...

Verso Gift Card

Share radical ideas with a Verso Gift Card. Our Gift Cards are available in $10, $25, $50 & $100 denominations and have no expiration date. All gift cards are digital and can only be redeemed...

Verso Gift Card

Share radical ideas with a Verso Gift Card. Our Gift Cards are available in $10, $25, $50 & $100 denominations and have no expiration date. All gift cards are digital and can only be redeemed...

Verso Planner and Notebook

Verso Radical Diary and Weekly Planner 2025

by Verso Books UK

The 2025 Verso Radical Diary is a week-to-view planner for keeping track of the year ahead. Alongside illustrations and book excerpts, it features significant radical dates from throughout history—...

Verso V Notebook

by Verso Books UK

Celebrate your favourite radical publishing house with our official branded merch! The Verso V Notebook beautfully celebrates our logo, is fully lined in the signature Verso red and in a handy port...

For understanding our current moment

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Verso Fiction

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...

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...

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that ...

For the Theory reader in your life

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: ...

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 ...

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...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

The Eye of the Master

by Matteo Pasquinelli

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as i...

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchme...

For the Marx obsessive

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...

Understanding the Climate Crisis

Overshoot

by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm

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...

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...

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...

The Price is Wrong

by Brett Christophers

RECENT TECHNICAL ADVANCES mean it is typically cheaper to produce electricity from renewable sources than from fossil fuels. Yet, around the world, the transition to green energy is happening too s...

History, with a difference

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...

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

by Jules Gill-Peterson

Award-winning historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s richly detailed narrative takes us from New York, London, and Paris to the colonial districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai’i to tell ...

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 ...

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...

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 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...

Jameson's final works

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...

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...

Work, AI, and digital economies

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

Calling all gamers

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...

Walter Rodney’s groundbreaking critique of colonialism

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

Reflections on walking

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...

A Philosophy of Walking

by Frédéric Gros

Translated by John Howe

By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no...

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