Books published by Verso Books

For 78 days in 1999, US and NATO forces launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia, killing upwards of 3000 people in the name of humanitarianism. This book challenges mainstream media coverage of the war and uncovers hidden agendas behind Western talk and a decade-long disinformation campaign waged by western leaders.

Mobility as politics: the inequality of movement from transport to climate change.

Reconstructs Los Angeles's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. This work tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. It gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West.

A field manual to the technologies that are changing our lives at bewildering speed

A classic of twentieth-century thought, charting how reason regressed back into myth and superstition

Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history

A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first timeOriginally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx's project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the cole normale superieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born. Previously only available in English in highly abridged form, this edition, appearing fifty years after its original publication in France, restores chapters by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere. It includes a major new introduction by tienne Balibar.

An impassioned manifesto from the author of Booker-winner God of Small Things, one of the most vocal campaigners in the world

Coates is the essential chronicler of black America, and his first memoir is a small and beautiful epic of growing up in 1980s Baltimore

In Frames of War, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war. This portrayal has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole peoples, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. These people are framed as already lost, to imprisonment, unemployment and starvation, and can easily be dismissed. In the twisted logic that rationalizes their deaths, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living.’ This disparity, Butler argues, has profound implications for why and when we feel horror, outrage, guilt, loss and righteous indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life.This book discerns the resistance to the frames of war in the context of the images from Abu Ghraib, the poetry from Guantanamo, recent European policy on immigration and Islam, and debates on normativity and non-violence. In this urgent response to ever more dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a re-conceptualization of the Left, one that brokers cultural difference and cultivates resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.