The explosive novel of Italy’s revolutionary 1969\nIt was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”\nAround him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets.\nWrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

We Want Everything: A Novel (Verso Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Balestrini, Nanni

United States

Verso Fiction

Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics. Like nothing else, Kurniawan’s stories bury themselves in the mind. His characters and insights are at once hauntingly familiar, peculiar, and twisted.

Kitchen Curse: Stories

Kurniawan, Eka

Literary

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “The cumulative effect is hypnotic. Hjorth works finely parsed and brilliant variations on her unrelenting theme of familial mistrust and misunderstanding.” –New York Times “A prickly, persuasive novel. Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is writing against repression, against the taboo on telling things as they really are. But he urges us to look at dead bodies; she forces us to regard bleeding souls.” –New Yorker Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different—a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured. Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman’s struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth’s novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.

Will and Testament: A Novel (Verso Fiction)

Hjorth, Vigdis

Winner of the 2020 Believer Book Award for Fiction "A brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose. Hjorth's novel ingeniously orbits the intimate stories that are possible only when a character has put words on paper and sent them through the post." - New York Times Book Review,&nbsp;"The Best Post Office Novel You Will Read Before the Election" "Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers." - Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? From the author of the 2019 National Book Award Longlisted Will and Testament Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months. This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

Long Live the Post Horn!

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Lyrical and radical, a debut novel that created a sensation in France Winner of the Prix Goncourt&nbsp;for first novel, one of the most prestigious literary awards in France A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is&nbsp;timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the&nbsp;bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day,&nbsp;condemned to death, and thrown into a cell to await the&nbsp;guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million&nbsp;Muslim&nbsp;Algerians. But what if the militant is a "pied-noir"? What if his lover&nbsp;was a member of the French Resistance? What happens&nbsp;to a "European" who chooses the side of anti-colonialism? By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story,&nbsp;was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by&nbsp;Le Monde as "vibrantly lyrical and somber" and by the journal La Croix as a "masterpiece".

Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us: A Novel

Andras, Joseph

A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of&nbsp;Clarice Lispector and&nbsp;Jeanette Winterson. Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic. Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of queer feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art. "Strange and lyrical. Hval's writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence." --Publishers Weekly "The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson."&nbsp;--Pitchfork

Girls Against God: A Novel

Hval, Jenny

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Thrillist, The Millions, Frieze, and Metropolis Japan The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on. Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O'Horan.

Terminal Boredom: Stories

Suzuki, Izumi

Genre Fiction

Faraway the Southern Sky: A Novel (Verso Fiction)

Is Mother Dead (Verso Fiction)

A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middleaged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controverdsial modern classic, Will and Testament\n'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art.The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought aboiut a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonius absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

The first novel from Izumi Suzuki to be published in English: a candid, intimate exploration of passion, music and transgression Hope I'm in for a good time, I thought. Even if it's just for tonight. Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun. Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist's love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.

Set My Heart on Fire: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

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Books by Verso Fiction