“Anglo-America's preeminent radical press.”—Harper’s

“The scale of the achievement of New Left Review and Verso,
which turns forty this year, is now clear.”—Nation

“A rigorously intelligent publisher.”—Sunday Times

New Left Books was launched by New Left Review in 1970, and took as its logo the Tatlin Tower—a planned monument to the Third International. Focusing initially on translating works of European political and social theory, economics and philosophy, the list during that decade included Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Lucio Colletti, Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács, Ernest Mandel, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre and Max Weber, as well as major original works by Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton, Tom Nairn and Raymond Williams. NLB’s list challenged established opinions both in the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective satellites, as well as providing important critical analyses of China, India and South America. The publishing house was always intended to be far broader in its reach than NLR. An early bestseller was Against Method by Paul Feyeraband.

Verso—the left-hand page—was launched as a paperback imprint at the end of the seventies. Since becoming NLB’s sole imprint, Verso has published landmark books by Tariq Ali, Benedict Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Robert Brenner, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Isaac Deutscher, Paul Feyeraband, Norman Finkelstein, David Harvey, Eric Hobsbawm, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Erik Olin Wright and Slavoj Žižek. New translations have included Jean Baudrillard, Régis Debray, André Gorz, Jürgen Habermas, Rigoberta Menchú, Roberto Schwarz and Paul Virilio.

During the nineties Verso set up an office in New York, and secured its reputation in a number of established and emerging fields. Major advances were made by Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein in historical sociology, Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti in cultural and literary theory, Robin Blackburn in the history of slavery, Robert Brenner in economic theory, Roberto Unger in social theory, Peter Gowan and Gopal Balakrishnan in international relations, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in political theory, and with David Harvey's rethinking of geography and capital. A new edition of the Communist Manifesto, on the 150th anniversary of its original publication, quickly became a global bestseller. Perry Anderson's essays on world politics, the trajectory of intellectuals, and the decline of Europe—in A Zone of Engagement and English Questions—became important reference points, not just for the Left.

Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker's brilliant Haymarket series led to definitive works on Whiteness studies by David Roediger, Alexander Saxton and Theodore Allen, Latino history and culture by Carlos Munoz and Rodolfo Acuña, Black politics by Manning Marable, feminist analysis by Michele Wallace, US history by Michael Denning and Paul Buhle, labor studies by Kim Moody, and postmodern geography by Edward Soja.

Since 2000, against the backdrop of America’s Long War, Verso has made landmark interventions in international politics, the Middle East, and South America, whilst also establishing a growing list of fiction, biography and memoir titles. Tariq Ali’s The Clash of Fundamentalisms offered a definitive account of the US wars on the Middle East, followed up in Bush in Babylon, and challenged mainstream interpretations of the War on Terror. On the ground reporting from the new war zones has come from Patrick Cockburn and Gideon Levy, while Joshua Phillips has documented the effects of torture on US Army protagonists as well as civilian victims. Emir Sader, Forrest Hylton, Gregory Wilpert, Peter Hallward and Richard Gott have explored the roots of the ‘left turn’ in Central and South America, as well as its global potential.