Books published by Verso Books

The secret life of the man who reshaped Russia

With racial justice struggles on the rise, a probing collection considers the past and future of Black radicalism

';Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,' wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know todayhome to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of ';going astray' in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

A radical anti-capitalist alternative to Eurozone austerity On the 25th January 2015 the Greek people voted in an election of historic importancenot just for Greece but potentially all of Europe. The radical party Syriza was elected and austerity and the neoliberal agenda is being challenged. Suddenly it seems as if there is an alternative. But what? The Eurozone is in a deep and prolonged crisis. It is now clear that monetary union is a historic failure, beyond repairand certainly not in the interests of Europe's working people. Building on the economic analysis of two of Europe's leading thinkers, Heiner Flassbeck and Costas Lapavitsas (a candidate standing for election on Syriza's list), Against the Troika is the first book to propose a strategic left-wing plan for how peripheral countries could exit the euro. With a change in government in Greece, and looming political transformations in countries such as Spain, this major intervention lays out a radical, anti-capitalist programme at a critical juncture for Europe. The final three chapters offer a detailed postmortem of the Greek catastrophe, explain what can be learned from itand provide a possible alternative. Against the Troika is a practical blueprint for real change in a continent wracked by crisis and austerity.

A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker's short storiesThe 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 The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

';It is only ideas gained from walking thathave any worth.'Nietzsche In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestsellerin France, leading thinker FredericGros charts the many different wayswe get from A to B the pilgrimage,the promenade, the protest march, thenature rambleand reveals what theysay about us. Gros draws attention to otherthinkers who also saw walking assomething central to their practice.On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eagerseclusion in Walden Woods; the reasonRimbaud walked in a fury, while Nervalrambled to cure his melancholy. Heshows us how Rousseau walked in orderto think, while Nietzsche wanderedthe mountainside to write. In contrast,Kant marched through his hometownevery day, exactly at the same hour, toescape the compulsion of thought.Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophyof Walking is an entertaining andinsightful manifesto for putting onefoot in front of the other.

Ernest Mandel's book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of ';historic compromise' and ';union of the people' today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the ';bitter fruits of socialism in one country' in the USSR.Mandel's book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF's theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a wholediscussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.