Verso imprint: 732 books

A pithy and readable challenge to the concept of human rights What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War, has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of reflective and critical studies,...

A narrative history of the movement that turned “Orientals” into Asian Americans Until the political ferment of the Long Sixties, there were no Asian Americans. There were only isolated communities of mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos lumped together as “Orientals.” Serve the...

The master of literary reportage reflects on the West’s encounters with the non-European In this distillation of reflections accumulated from a lifetime of travel, Ryszard Kapuscinski takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other. Looking at this concept through the lens of his own...

Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical...

Five leading thinkers on the concept of ‘rights’ in an era of rightlessness Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the “inalienable” Rights of Man—before there can be any...

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated,...

A rich and accessible introduction to Marx’s fundamental concepts from a key intellectual—now updated Written by one of political theory’s leading thinkers, The Philosophy of Marx examines all the key areas of Marx’s writings in their wider historical and theoretical context—including...

A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and...

An extraordinary memoir of transition and transgender politics and culture “Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation.” In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent...

A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation....

An examination of the shifts in politics and revolution in China over the last century What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and in China’s Twentieth Century the country’s leading critic,...

Alfredo Gutierrez’s father, a US citizen, was deported to Mexico from his Arizona hometown—the mining town where Alfredo grew up. This occurred during a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria stoked by the Great Depression, but as Gutierrez makes clear, in a book that is both a personal chronicle and...

A Mexican-American lawyer exposes corruption in the US asylum procedure and despotism in the Mexican government From a storefront law office in the US border city of El Paso, Texas, one man set out to tear down the great wall of indifference raised between the US and Mexico. Carlos Spector...

Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first...