Insight Meditation surveys a wide range of topics asked by students, whether they are beginners attending their first weekend course or seasoned practitioners on a three-month retreat. In short sections that can be either read in sequence or browsed through at leisure, leading meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein offers favorite Dharma stories, key teachings, and answers to most-asked questions. He provides an overview of Buddhist practice and its context generally while focusing on vipassana meditation specifically. He covers what the path itself is composed of, how to practice, what freeing the mind is all about, how karma works, the connection between psychology and dharma practice, and a look at what selflessness really is. The concluding chapter is a detailed exploration of how to practice in the world, touching on topics like the art of communication, family relationships, work and livelihood, dying, and how to really be of benefit to others.

Insight Meditation audiobook sample

Concise, potent, poetic messages of inspiration, direction, and encouragement for you to embrace rest and reflection as a deep spiritual practice.

In this compelling follow-up to her popular book, Pause, Rest, Be, Octavia Raheem offers succinct, gem-like teachings that invite us to find ways to embrace rest in our daily lives. Rest, she posits, is not only restorative—it connects you to your inner wisdom and is a portal to revelation. Raheem urges us to consider rest as a spiritual practice and to find ways to weave it into the busyness of our everyday life. In this way, she says, we can more fully “rise to the occasion of our life.”

Raheem uses personal reflection, and creative, evocative “sutras” (or, just as aptly, aphorisms, threads, psalms, or proverbs) and inquiry to guide us toward a more well-rested present and future. The forty sutras fall into three categories:

Rest as a place of refuge from the storms of life
Rest as a place to remember who you are
Rest as a place of revelation

Each page of Rest is Sacred invites the reader into seeing rest as a contemplative practice and a way of life—and to reflect on our relationship to grind culture. The sutras are concise, potent, and inspiring and can be read in a moment, contemplated, or lingered over. Raheem offers the view that the most sustainable future available to us is a well-rested one, and that rest isn’t a luxury—it is a necessary spiritual practice that is available to us all.

Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Rest Is Sacred audiobook sample

This week we’ve got something a little different for you. Whilst we’re still technically between seasons - and working hard to bring you more roundtable discussions with our wonderful Verso authors in our upcoming fourth series of The Verso Podcast - we wanted to share a great episode we’ve been collaborating on with our friends over at Macrodose. 

Macrodose is a podcast from Planet B Productions that brings you a weekly briefing on the economy, and takes a look behind the media headlines to work out what’s really going on. You can listen to the podcast and support the show at patreon.com/macrodose

In this episode you’ll be hearing from Craig Gent, author of Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work - published recently by Verso Books. As well as being a writer Craig is also a researcher and the North of England Editor at Novara Media.

In this bonus show, Craig will be exploring the role of algorithms in the workplace. He’ll be covering the big questions - such as, what’s at stake as algorithms are slowly, quietly integrated into our everyday lives? Is it just an inevitable fact of the long march toward progress? Or does it open a new frontier of class struggle that we need to take seriously and think about strategically? In other words what happens when your boss is a robot, and what do we do about it?

You can find Craig's book "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" here: www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2958-cyberboss

Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can be the first to know when season four drops - and so that you don’t miss any of the bonus content coming your way between now and then. 

If you enjoy The Verso Podcast please consider leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts - it really helps us out!

Macrodose: Cyberboss | Craig Gent

Discover a path of healing, post-traumatic growth, spiritual insight, and deep compassion for the most challenging parts of yourself

Therapist and meditation teacher Ralph De La Rosa places the innovative, evidence-based model of Internal Family Systems (IFS) in the context of Buddhist meditation to show that the process of healing trauma can lead you to your deepest spiritual nature. This book offers clear conceptual frameworks to understand trauma, post-traumatic growth, and the close relationship between healing trauma and spirituality. The many journal prompts, experiential practices, and guided meditations will teach you how to
see that your mind is made up of disparate “parts” that carry their own views and intentions that can become stuck in traumatic experiences;
recognize common types of inner parts in the IFS model, such as “Managers,” “Firefighters,” and “Exiles;”
separate from a part inside of you that’s holding grief, pain, or other difficult feelings and then elicit its concerns and wisdom;
and utilize meditation as a method for opening to transformative self-compassion and self-love.
A survivor himself of depression, PTSD, and addiction, De La Rosa shares gripping, inspirational life stories to demonstrate the path of outshining trauma.

Running time: 10 hours, 32 minutes

Outshining Trauma audiobook sample

This week we have a special episode for you as part of our inter-season programming - an interview with Enzo Traverso. Of course, we’re still working hard to bring you more roundtable discussions with our wonderful Verso authors in our upcoming fourth series of The Verso Podcast, but until then we have some exciting interim episodes coming up for you.

Enzo Traverso is a writer, political scientist, and professor of humanities at Cornell University. His previous books include Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914 to 1945, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right, The Origins of Nazi Violence, and The End of Jewish Modernity. He sat down with verso editor Sebastian Budgen to explore his life, his work and his latest book, Revolution: An Intellectual History - released in a new paperback edition earlier this year.

The book charts a new history of the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries - from Alexandra Kollontai’s cries for sexual liberation in Russia, to Louis Auguste Blanqui’s barricades in France, to Ho Chi Minh’s independence proclamation in Vietnam. In drawing these examples together, the book seeks answers to the fundamental question of how to unmake and then remake the world - of what revolution means and what it demands from us.

In this interview, Enzo talks about his intellectual beginnings, about the new global far right, the Frankfurt School, left wing melancholia, and Israel's war against Gaza. 

If you'd like to read more about how people down the ages have tried to change the world - and sometimes even succeeded - then Enzo’s book, Revolution: An Intellectual History is available now from Verso Books: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2783-revolution

And don’t forget - be sure to subscribe to the show so you can be the first to know when season four drops - and so that you don’t miss any of the bonus content coming your way between now and then. 

If you enjoy The Verso Podcast please consider leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts - it really helps us out!

Fascism, Marxism and Israel | Enzo Traverso

Our modern, Western societal understanding of what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother largely remains uncharted territory. Mothershift offers a supportive, affirming road map to take women through the cascade of identity change and transformation that is motherhood.    

Jessie Harrold introduces her “map for your becoming,” a research-based, four-phase model that maps out how the transition to motherhood unfolds—and helps women to navigate every step along the way. Harrold also includes self-inquiry questions and journal prompts in each chapter to help women identify and thrive amidst the cascade of changes they can expect as they enter motherhood. Her wise, inspiring, and practical approach shows what it can look like when women are supported and encouraged to experience motherhood as a rite of passage filled with power and potential.

Running time: 8 hours, 26 minutes

Mothershift audiobook sample

For readers of mythology, an original and introspective journey through the life of the Buddha accompanied by 26 beautiful color illustrations and 8 meditations.

From longtime Zen teacher and poet John Tarrant comes an original retelling of the foundational myth of Buddhism—the life of the Buddha. Told and retold for centuries, this story holds a special place in the human legacy because it is, ultimately, an investigation of the nature of mind and consciousness.

Tarrant leans into his memories of the Egyptian and Greek myths he encountered as a child. “If we pour ourselves into the story of the Buddha,” he writes, “we enter the journey from an unusual place as far as myths go; we begin where the Odyssey ends.” The Buddha already had everything—a palace, family, food, wealth—yet he was suffocating with discontent. He needed to embark on a journey involving pain, searching, magic, and personal discovery. This led to his awakening and the teachings that form the basis of Buddhism.

With twenty-six gorgeous historical illustrations and eight meditations drawn from the Zen tradition, the Buddha’s story becomes your own story, opening an unexpected path to awakening. If you listen to the images that arise in its telling, you can find where you are in life and where you are headed.

Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes

The Story of the Buddha audiobook sample

The BookBlast® Translation Book Club meets in person on the second Monday of each month at Hatchards, Piccadilly, to discuss works of fiction in translation published in the last ten years. Host, Georgia de Chamberet,  and Hatchards’ booksellers, choose well-written, engaging storytelling to inspire reading for pleasure as well as illuminating cultures from around the world.
Hear our special guest at the October Translation Book Club, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, co-editor and translator of Warsaw Tales (OUP 2024). She is best-known for translating Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Hear highlights of Antonia's presentation and illuminating comments from book club members.
Presented by Georgia de Chamberet | A BookBlast® Production| 00:35:23

BookBlast Hatchards Translation Book Club 

Warsaw Tales, BookBlast® Translation Book Club

Warsaw Tales, BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards Piccadilly

On this week’s episode of The Verso Podcast we’re back to our typical format - our host, Eleanor Penny, is joined by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm to discuss their new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (BUY HERE: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3131-overshoot). We’re still working on bringing you more of these roundtable discussions with our wonderful Verso authors in our upcoming fourth series of The Verso Podcast, but in the meantime we hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with two of key thinkers on the politics of climate breakdown. And don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for more inter-season programming in the run up to season 4!

We’re well into the third decade of the twenty-first century and we have still failed to save the world. Twenty-eight COP conferences on climate change have been and gone - and whilst there’s been plenty of mud wrestling over tipping points and temperatures rises, nothing ever really happens. In fact, the further we creep towards unliveable global temperature rises, the more fossil fuels get burned.

In response, an attitude has taken hold in some parts of climate politics that the fight to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees is a lost cause. Some people claim that instead of mitigating emissions now, we should instead be looking at strategies to tactically ‘overshoot’ warming targets, before using carbon capture and removal to turn the heat back down again. If you’ve just invested in a new oil pipeline, that attitude might look very appealing. Less so if you are living in parts of the world already burning, starving or drowning in a new age of heatwaves.

In this in-depth discussion, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm chart the embrace of this ‘overshoot’ thinking in environmental circles, in business, and in politics - asking what it means for the delicate life systems on this planet, and what we might be able to do about it.

Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over twenty academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode. 

Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of, among other books, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.

And don’t forget - be sure to subscribe to the show so you can be the first to know when season four drops - and so that you don’t miss any of the bonus content coming your way between now and then. 

If you enjoy The Verso Podcast please consider leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts - it really helps us out!


Overshoot | Andreas Malm & Wim Carton

The first portrait of spiritual luminary Thomas Keating’s remarkable evolution, in the last decades of his life, into a fully realized modern-day Christian mystic.

In the first four decades of his life as a Trappist monk, Thomas Keating created a comprehensive, unified psychospiritual pathway leading from healing to holiness and from contemporary psychological wellness to classic mystical sanctity and beatitude. As one of the key innovators of the meditative practice of Centering Prayer, he fashioned a powerful on-ramp to the Christian contemplative tradition. Yet, as beloved author and Keating disciple Cynthia Bourgeault shows, that was not the end of Keating’s story—his evolution as a spiritual thinker and mystic continued in ways few have explored in depth. In this unique blend of biography, personal experience, and close reading of his late works, Bourgeault illuminates Keating’s remarkable spiritual development from the late 1980s until his death in 2018.

Running time: 7 hours, 53 minutes

Thomas Keating audiobook sample

The BookBlast® Podcast is for writers, translators and curious readers who want a behind-the-scenes snapshot of the world of literature and translation. And it’s free! 
Online journal, The BookBlast Diary, has showcased independent trade publishing and world writing with a focus on translation and Francophone literature since 2016. 
BookBlast is a registered trademark.
Find us at www.bookblast.com or on X formerly twitter @bookblast

Warsaw Tales, BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards Piccadilly

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