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| Parent company | New Left Review |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1970 (as New Left Books) |
| Headquarters location |
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| Distribution | Penguin Random House (U.S.) Marston Book Services (UK) Bloomsbury Publishing (Australia) |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | www |
Verso Books (formerly New Left Books) is a left-wing publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review (NLR) and includes Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson on its board of directors.
In 1970, Verso Books began as a paperback imprint. It established itself as a publisher of nonfiction works on international politics. Verso Books has also periodically published fiction over its history. [1] The publisher gained early recognition for translations of books by European thinkers and Continental philosophy, especially those from the Frankfurt School, and its affiliation with Marxist and neo-Marxist writers. Verso Books' best-selling title is the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. [2]
On April 8, 2014 Verso began bundling DRM-free e-books with print purchases made through its website. Verso's managing director and US publisher, Jacob Stevens, stated that he expected the new offer on the Verso website to contribute £200,000 to the publisher's revenue in its first year helping to "shake up how publishers relate to their readership, and help to support independent publishing". [3]
In 2019, Verso Books launched its fiction imprint, Verso Fiction. [4] The fiction editor, Cian McCourt, said, "We want to publish bold, intelligent writing that's politically astute, but not dogmatic or charmless." [1]
By 2020, Verso Books had published over 1,800 titles. [5]
Verso Books titles are distributed in the United States by Penguin Random House. The publishing house is known to host many events in the United States and the UK, focusing on radical politics and history. [6]
Verso has published books by Tariq Ali, Benedict Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, C.L.R James, Mike Davis, Norman Finkelstein, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Max Shachtman, Rebecca Solnit, Nick Srnicek, Paul Feyerabend, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Slavoj Žižek. [7] Updated translations of Jean Baudrillard, Régis Debray, Jürgen Habermas, Rigoberta Menchú, and Paul Virilio have also been published through Verso.
Verso Books was originally known as New Left Books. The name "Verso" refers to the technical term for the left-hand page in a book (see recto and verso), and is a play on words regarding its political outlook and is also reminiscent of the expression "vice versa," or "the other way around".
In 2021, Verso was publicly accused of poorly handling an internal sexual harassment grievance brought by a former publicist against its long-time US publisher, Jacob Stevens. She described the incident in a Medium piece thus: "He then said, of my hiring, “we needed someone nice to look at in the office besides Wes.” She claims that this remark, along with Verso's inadequate response to her allegation that it was inappropriate and disrespectful, caused severe depression, including self-harm in the form of excessive exercise, cutting and burning herself, and trying to hang herself from a stairwell. [8]
Per the writer's account, the incident occurred in the period following the #MeToo movement, during which Verso author Franco Moretti [9] and Verso and New Left Review board member Gopal Balakrishnan [10] were accused of sexual assault (the latter resigned from the NLR board and subsequently was fired from UC Santa Cruz). It was also shortly following the creation of the Shitty Media Men list of largely NYC-based literary and publishing institutions. The writer emphasizes what she felt as the company's hypocrisy in publishing feminist books in comparison to their internal policies and practices. The board of directors responded with a public apology and updates on their sexual harassment policy. However, they likewise maintain that their procedures were properly followed, as determined by an independent review. [11]
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, CRC Press, Routledge, F1000 Research and Dovepress. It is a division of Informa plc, a United Kingdom-based publisher and conference company.
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David Matthew Stoll is an American cultural anthropologist. His research has focused on the indigenous peoples of modern Latin America, and especially on the Mayas in Guatemala. He has been a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College since 1997.
Aijaz Ahmad was an Indian-born American Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and political commentator. He was the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Humanities’ Department of Comparative Literature.
Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Group. HBG was formed when Hachette Livre purchased the Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner on March 31, 2006. Its headquarters are located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Hachette is considered one of the "big five" publishing companies, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. In one year, HBG publishes approximately 1400+ adult books, 300 books for young readers, and 450 audiobook titles. In 2017, the company had 167 books on the New York Times bestseller list, 34 of which reached No. 1.
Franco Moretti is an Italian literary historian and theorist. He graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972. He has taught at the universities of Salerno (1979–1983) and Verona (1983–1990); in the US, at Columbia (1990–2000) and Stanford (2000–2016), where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel, and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab. Moretti has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton, the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, and has been a lecturer and visiting professor in many countries, including, until the end of 2019, the Digital Humanities Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Gay Left was a collective of gay men and a journal of the same name which they published every six months in London between the years 1975 and 1980. It was formed after the dissolution of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Marxist Group. Gay Left formed out of a reading group made up of members of the defunct Gay Marxist group.
Gopal Balakrishnan was a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until he was fired due to allegations of sexual assault.
The Quarto Group is a global illustrated book publishing group founded in 1976. It is domiciled in the United States and listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Amazon Publishing is Amazon's book publishing unit launched in 2009. It is composed of 15 imprints including AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing, Montlake Romance, Thomas & Mercer, 47North, and TOPPLE Books.
The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad is a 2010 book by British-Pakistani writer, journalist, political activist and historian Tariq Ali.
Freight Books was an independent publisher based in Glasgow. It published books for an English speaking readership, including award-winning literary fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction and humour. Freight Books was named Scotland's Publisher of the Year 2015 by the Saltire Society. Freight Books published the debut novel of Martin Cathcart Froden, the winner of the 2015 Dundee International Book Prize.
The Day After the Revolution is a 2017 nonfiction book of writings of Vladimir Lenin edited by Slavoj Žižek, who also provides an extensive introduction. Published by socialist media group Verso Books, the work consists of writings from after the Soviet victory during the Russian Civil War up to his death in 1924. Žižek describes this body of writings as significant to understanding the philosophical potential of Lenin's revolutionary ideology and its significance to contemporary leftism.
Repeater Books is a publishing imprint based in London, founded in 2014 by Tariq Goddard and Mark Fisher, formerly the founders of radical publishers Zero Books, along with Etan Ilfeld, Tamar Shlaim, Alex Niven and Matteo Mandarini.
Endeavour Press was a British independent publishing company founded in 2011 by Matthew Lynn and Richard Foreman. Endeavour started as an e-book publisher of out of print books, but grew to sign up frontlist titles from new authors in seven different imprints, including a print arm. The company specialised in thrillers, historical fiction, romance and non-fiction, but their several imprints encompassed horror, fantasy, science-fiction, westerns and literary fiction as well.
Lume Books is an independent publishing company based in London. Founded in 2018 by Matthew Lynn, Lume has published many award-winning authors including Marjorie Bowen, A. J. P. Taylor, Paula DiPerna, Nick Thorpe, Wendy Perriam, Ramsey Campbell, Alan Palmer and Robert E. Howard.
Collective Ink Limited is a publishing company founded in the United Kingdom in 2001 under the name John Hunt Publishing and launched as O Books. The publisher has 15 active imprints, the largest of which are Moon Books, O-Books and Zero Books. The Zero Books imprint was founded to combat what they viewed as a trend of anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture. After changing ownership in 2021, in June 2023, John Hunt Publishing was renamed to Collective Ink.
Europa Editions UK is an independent British publishing house. It was founded in 2011 by Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, the owners and publishers of the Italian press company Edizioni E/O. In a 2013 interview, Sandro Ferri said the company was "born with the intention to create bridges between cultures."
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