The war, the conspirators, their plot, and its discovery 1643: The second year of a bitter civil war in England. The fourth year since the opening of the Long Parliament. King Charles I and his court are at Oxford, chased out of London in early 1642 by rebellious…

Jasper Bernes is the author of The Future of Revolution and is a regular contributor to the Field Notes section of The Brooklyn Rail. His previous tiles include The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization and two books of poetry, We Are Nothing and…

Scene 5: The Guildhall The Tower was not the only magazine in the City. The conspirators also targeted Guildhall, seat of City government right in the heart of the most radical part of the City, the Coleman Street ward, and Leadenhall. So was the store of…

There’s hardly been a moment to breathe — let alone sit, take stock, commemorate. If April 17th marked one year since the largest anti-war protests in a generation, the picture now looks almost impossibly bleak. Flimsy and insincere as it may have been, it…

Lenin was born 155 years ago this week. To mark the occasion, we're taking 30% off Lenin's writing and a selection of books about revolution in the 20th century. Shop the discounted titles below. [book-strip index="1"]

Rare amongst Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci saw ‘the history of industrialism’ less as a tale of progress than as a ‘struggle […] against the element of “animality” in man’.  In this way Gramsci differed from other socialists, including Karl Marx, who…

"The heat is rapidly becoming too much to bear, and precisely for that reason, it is too late to give up this struggle. There is, henceforth, no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual." – from the…

This May Day, Verso Books will be hosting a panel discussion with organizers and shop stewards from every unionized bookstore in NYC. Representatives from Barnes & Noble, McNally Jackson, Book Culture, Greenlight, and The Strand will join Verso Guild unit…

[book-strip index="1"] In the morning hours of 25 April 1974, a movement led by captains and servicemen in the Portuguese Armed Forces set in motion the manoeuvres that, within twenty-four hours, would bring down Europe’s oldest conservative dictatorship…

A virgin maiden abandons her ceremonial role to hunt vampires with her immortal bodyguard. A woman falls for her faerie kidnapper and goes on a quest to save his kingdom. A war college misfit has eyes for the son of a rival family—and their dragons are mates.…

In the Latest Issue: Wolfgang Streeck offers insights following a Bundestag election highly polarized around immigration which has placed another centrist coalition in power. The hardline Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz is now propelling a high-spending…

Scenes 9 and 10: St. James and the King’s Army When the rising happened, it was clearly intended that the King’s children should be taken into safe custody at St. James palace. Meanwhile, the plot did not depend on the forces raised in the City alone. They…

Poet, communist, cat-lover, teacher, music critic, roadrunner, critical theorist, Marxist: though not necessarily in this order, Joshua Clover was all those things--and more. To me, however, he was first and foremost my compadre, the nonbiological family…

May 1st marks International Workers' Day, a festival of working-class self-organization stretching back over 135 years. We're celebrating with a sitewide sale: take up to 50% off all Verso titles through May 8th! Verso Books May Day SaleEnds May 8th @ 11:59pm…

Join Verso for a panel on the state of criticism and the Left, considering the place of politics when writing about culture. Please RSVP here! What are the responsibilities of the critic during an ongoing genocide or when faced with the rise of fascism? How…

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In 1975, I delivered a set of lectures at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, some months before the Congress government under Indira Gandhi, declared a State of Emergency. The Communist Party of India supported her. The Communist Party of India (Marxist)…

The great promise of modernity has always been efficiency. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanical calculation to the algorithmic optimization of labor in today’s AI-driven workplaces, efficiency is treated as an unquestioned virtue, a force that separates…

In celebration of their sophomore LP, Deposition, Brooklyn duo Pizza Guy will perform the album live in the Verso office. Featuring Andrew Marzoni (vocals, keyboards, guitars), M. H. Miller (vocals & guitars), Trey Strange (alto saxophone), and special guests.…

The writing below excerpts and adapts a section of Verso author David Roediger’s An Ordinary White: My Anti-racist Education, an autobiography recently published by Fordham University Press. I rose to a sort of pale academic fame in the 1990s following the…