Verso: 737 books
Red Flag Unfurled
History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2017
Reconsidering the Russian Revolution a century later
Reflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after the October Uprising, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores how scholars and political scientists have tried to understand...
by Samuel Moyn
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2014
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,...
Serve the People
Making Asian America in the Long Sixties
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2016
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...
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2018
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...
by Vivek Chibber
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2014
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...
by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Samuel Moyn
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2018
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
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2014
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,...
by Étienne Balibar
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2017
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...
The Storyteller
Tales out of Loneliness
Language: English
Release Date: July 26, 2016
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...
Trans
A Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2015
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...
The Lamentations of Zeno
A Novel
Language: English
Release Date: May 3, 2016
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....
China's Twentieth Century
Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
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,...
To Sin Against Hope
Life and Politics on the Borderland
Language: English
Release Date: March 12, 2013
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...
We Built the Wall
How the U.S. Keeps Out Asylum Seekers from Mexico, Central America and Beyond
Language: English
Release Date: June 26, 2018
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...