Year-End Lists

Verso Books: Best Books of 2017 (some of which were published previously but were still “favourites of the year”)

[see also 2024 • 2023]

Fiction

• Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
  James Baldwin
• The Corpse Exhibition

  And Other Stories of Iraq
  Hassan Blasim
• The Gift
  Barbara Browning
• Jane Eyre
  Charlotte Brontë
• The Debutante and Other Stories
  Leonora Carrington
• The Vet’s Daughter
  Barbara Comyns
• Segu
  Maryse Conde
• The Doll’s Alphabet
  Camilla Grudova
• The Secret Life of Saeed

  The Pessoptimist
  Emile Habiby
• Darker With the Lights On
  David Hayden
• Hot Milk
  Deborah Levy
• Her Body and Other Parties
  Carmen Maria Machado
• Evening Primrose

  a heart-wrenching novel for our times
  Kopano Matlwa
• First Love
  Gwendoline Riley
• Conversations with Friends
  Sally Rooney
• Love Story
  Erich Segal
• We That Are Young
  Preti Taneja
• Attrib. and other stories
  Eley Williams
• The Hoke Moseley Detective Series
  Charles Willeford
• The Underground Railroad
  Colson Whitehead

Nonfiction

• Morbid Symptoms

  Relapse in the Arab Uprising
  Gilbert Achcar
• After Kathy Acker
  Chris Kraus
• Under My Thumb

  Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
  Edited by Rhian Jones and Eli Davies
• Cosmic Society

  Towards a Sociology of the Universe
  Peter Dickens and James Ormrod
• The Greeks and the Irrational
  E.R. Dodds
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
  Reni Eddo-Lodge
• Capitalist Realism

  Is There No Alternative?
  Mark Fisher
• No Mercy Here

  Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
  Sarah Haley
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself
  Harriet Ann Jacobs
• Spheres of Existence

  Selected Writings
  C.L.R. James
• Hell’s Destruction

  An Exploration of Christ’s Descent to the Dead
  Catherine Ella Laufer
• Your Silence Will Not Protect You
  Audre Lorde
• Beyond Words

  What Animals Think and Feel
  Carl Safina
• Against the Grain

  A Deep History of the Earliest States
  James C. Scott
• The Black Pacific

  Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections
  Robbie Shilliam
• Marx’s Inferno

  The Political Theory of Capital
  William Clare Roberts
• Storming Heaven

  Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
  Steve Wright

Memoir

• Living for Change

  An Autobiography
  Grace Lee Boggs
• Close to the Knives

  A Memoir of Disintegration
  David Wojnarowicz