Reading list

Flash Verso ebook sale!

Curate your dream Verso ebook reading list! 80% off all ebooks ends August 9th!

Verso Books 2 August 2024

Flash Verso ebook sale!

Until 9th August 2024, enjoy 80% off ALL ebooks! 

Apologies if you don't have an e-reader, but all our print books are 20% off!

Please note that fulfilment of all UK orders of print books is likely going to be delayed until mid-August. See more info here.

Free Ebook

And as the Olympic Games roll on in Paris, we've made this critical political history of the Games free to download! 

"A great irony is that the modern Olympics, first envisioned as an alternative to war, have themselves become a form of low-intensity warfare." — Mike Davis

To get your free ebook: add to cart and go through the check-out process.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

Verso Ebook Bestsellers

To help you put together your dream ebook reading list, we bring you our best-selling ebooks across the last year.

[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]

Radical Paris

Paris is constantly changing as a living organism, both for better and for worse. These books will help you engage with all that Paris embodies.

[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]

Too Heavy to Carry

Now you can carry 944 pages of Lefebvre’s classic analysis without breaking your back!

[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]

Palestine Will Be Free

Essential reading on the long history of Israel's occupation of Palestine, including a free ebook published in collaboration with Haymarket Books: From The River To The Sea.

[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]

New Works of Theory

Theory never takes place in a void. These new interventions build upon the works of Verso classics.

[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]

Verso Fiction

Uncompromisingly intelligent and beautiful fiction.

[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]

Terms and Conditions

80% off all ebooks will end at midnight (EDT) on August 9th. It applies to all available ebooks on our website.

Each individual book page shows the various available formats of a book is. Typically there will be a print edition, and an ebook edition listed on the page.

Not all ebooks are available in all regions: it will be clear on the book page whether something is available for you to purchase.

Some older titles are not yet available in ebook format. We're working on it!

See all our ebook FAQs here.

If you experience any issues please email: orders@versobooks.com (for US and Canada customers) or orders@verso.co.uk (for UK, Europe and Rest of World customers).

Power Games

Power Games

The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event’s nineteenth-century origins, through the Games’...
Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?
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...
Black Meme
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...
Nuclear is Not the Solution
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...
New Radical Enlightenment

New Radical Enlightenment

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...
Disordered Attention
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...
Learning from the Enemy
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...
Against Landlords
Housing means prosperity and security for some; poverty, precarity and sickness for others. More people live in private rented accommodation than ever before, and rents rise without apparent reason...
Magical Urbanism
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. ...
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...
The Zone
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,...
Balzac's Paris
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...
Communal Luxury
Kristin Ross’s new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression...
The History of the Paris Commune of 1871
In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of being exploited, seized control of the capital. This book is the outstanding history of the Commune, theh...
Transclasses
One is not born a worker or a boss, one becomes one from father to son... or almost. Social reproduction is not an iron law; it admits of exceptions that must be accounted for in order to measure i...
Algiers, Third World Capital
Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
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...
Critique of Everyday Life
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...
A Social History of Western Political Thought
In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines th...
Burn It Down!
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...
Late Capitalism
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 ...
The Reckoning
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...
Towers of Ivory and Steel
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, ...
From the River to the Sea
In the final months of 2023, as this ebook is published, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly made their intentions to do so extremely clear; talking of collec...
The Palestine Laboratory
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...
Mural

Mural

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...
Ten Myths About Israel
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...
In Search of Fatima
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 ...
The Automatic Fetish
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...
Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism
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 Double Shift
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 Eye of the Master
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
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...
Late Fascism
The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great ...
The Last Sane Woman
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...
Paradise Rot

Paradise Rot

"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...
Faraway the Southern Sky

Faraway the Southern Sky

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...
Crooked Plow

Crooked Plow

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 ...
Hit Parade of Tears

Hit Parade of Tears

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of t...
Bluebeard's Castle
When the successful British mystery writer Judith Moore meets Gavin, a handsome and charming baron, at a birthday party on the Cornish coast, his love transforms her from a bitter, lonely young wom...