Verso

About Verso

Verso is a radical independent publisher based in London and New York, owned by the New Left Review, which began as New Left Books in 1970 and is known for left-wing politics, history and theory by writers such as Benedict Anderson, Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek.

New Left Books was launched by the New Left Review in 1970 and chose the Tatlin Tower, the unbuilt Soviet monument to the Third International, as its emblem. It made its name with translations of European thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method was an early bestseller. Verso was started as a paperback imprint at the end of the 1970s and later became the firm's sole imprint.

Benedict Anderson's study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, first appeared in 1983 and has sold more than 250,000 copies. Other notable titles include Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Mike Davis's Planet of Slums and Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, while Rigoberta Menchú's autobiography is its best-selling book.

Verso opened a New York office in the 1990s, moving it across the East River to Brooklyn in 2007, and has editors in London, New York and Paris. It publishes about 100 books a year and had more than 1,800 titles by 2020.