Effective July 1, Verso Books will be sold and distributed in North America by Random House Publisher Services. Since 1996, Verso has been sold and distributed in the U.S. by Norton and in Canada by Penguin Group.
Founded 45 years ago and with offices in London, Paris and Brooklyn, Verso is one of the major leftist publishers in the world and puts out 80 books a year in anthropology, biography and memoir, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, economics, fiction, political theory and history. Its bestsellers and best known titles include The Clash of Fundamentalisms by Tariq Ali, Planet of Slums by Mike Davis, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, Living in the End Times by Slavoj Zizek, A People's History of the World by Chris Harman and The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition by Karl Marx. Other authors include John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Régis Debray, Isaac Deutscher, Jürgen Habermas, Eric Hobsbawm, Rosa Luxemburg, Edward Said and André Schiffrin.
Verso Books managing director Jacob Stevens thanked Norton and Penguin for having "helped Verso immeasurably over the years, improving our American operation and growing our sales year on year." Random House, he added, "will bring our books to yet more readers."