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“In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.”Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy spells out with unrivalled clarity the damage inflicted by the myth that endless work is morally virtuous. Presenting an inspiring vision of social equality and of individual human fulfilment, Lafargue’s text remains one of the most powerful denunciations of “economic prejudices” ever written.

“The Greeks never said that the limit could not he overstepped. They said it existed and that whoever dared to exceed it was mercilessly struck down. Nothing in present history can contradict them.”Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus’s essay is a searching inquiry into the origins of the hubris and fanaticism that laid waste to twentieth-century Europe. At once a celebration of the classical virtues of balance and serenity and a warning to Camus’s contemporaries, Helen’s Exile is a profound analysis of the nature of modernity.

“Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.”In The Case Against Travel the philosopher Agnes Callard launches a vigorous assault on the idea that there is something transformative or ennobling about recreational travel. Going well beyond commonplace complaints about the irksomeness of tourists, Callard’s essay is a probing inquiry into what it really means to change one’s life, and into the ways in which we try to disguise the fact that life will come to an end.

Over a period of many years, the celebrated English novelist Tim Parks and the Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti have been discussing the nature of consciousness. Not long ago, Parks suggested to his friend that they condense their exchanges “into a series of focused dialogues to set out the standard positions on consciousness, and suggest some alternatives.” Fifteen of the resultant conversations were edited by Parks and published in The New York Review of Books online—one of its most popular features ever.Now collected into one slim but thought-provoking volume, the dialogues reveal the profound scholarship of the two men. Their talks touch upon Aristotle and William James, the Higgs boson and Descartes, and include topics such as “Where Are Words?”, “The Body and Us”, “The Reality of Dreams”, “The Object of Consciousness”, and finally “Consciousness: What Is It?”. For those of us searching for insight into some of life’s most basic puzzles—how do we think? how do we perceive one another, and ourselves?—Dialogues on Consciousness will take its place alongside other classics of philosophy.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”T. S. Eliot’s advocacy of “impersonality” as a literary ideal in Tradition and the Individual Talent had an immeasurable impact on Modernist literature and continues to resonate today. An incisive (and controversial) account of individual artists’ relation to their forebears, this essay remains an outstanding work of critical prose.

“Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.”Virginia Woolf’s essay begins by lamenting the surprise neglect of ill-health as a potential literary subject. What then unfolds is a dazzlingly written series of reflections on sickness, fiction, and the chilling indifference of the natural world. Above all a testament to the fundamental solitariness of the human soul, this is an indispensable work by the preeminent stylist of twentieth-century English literature.

“There is a common fallacy that is oddly and sadly even more widespread amongst non-philosophers than philosophers, that art is somehow explained by philosophy. It is not.”The philosopher Simon Critchley has long been drawn to the distinctive questions raised by tragedy. In this major new work, conceived as a sequel to his Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019), he describes the power of tragic drama as deriving from its depictions of 'stuckness': of the inescapable situation of being oneself. In readings of Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett, Critchley offers an exceptionally perceptive account of how tragedy dramatises this irreducibly absurd condition.I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas. Critchley’s exposition of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of tragic drama—of tragedy’s resistance to the kind of rational explanations that philosophers have sought to impose upon it—doesn’t just enhance our understanding of literature; it also points towards a wiser, more subtle, and more dynamic way of doing philosophy.

“What makes shit such a universal joke is that it’s an unmistakable reminder of our duality, of our soiled nature and of our will to glory. It is the ultimate lèse-majesté”.John Berger’s essay begins by describing the experience of burying a year’s worth of his household’s excrement. What follows is an extended reflection—at once philosophically detached and profoundly engaged with the inescapable stuff of life—on shit as an emblem of what it means to be human: on our simultaneous kinship with and profound difference from all other animals.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

Rameau’s Nephew is a fictional conversation written by Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of the French Enlightenment. Composed over many years and exploding onto the French literary scene when it was first released, in form and content it is unique in French literature. In a famous Parisian chess café, a down-and-out (“HIM”) accosts a former acquaintance (“ME”) who has more or less made good. They trade stories and satirise the society in which they move, one of extreme inequality, corruption, and envy, where mediocrity is allowed to flourish. They gossip about the circle of hangers-on in which the down-and-out abides and discuss the nature of genius, good and evil, chess, music, and art. And towards half past five, when the warning bell of the Opera sounds, they part, going their separate ways.The book fascinated Goethe, Hegel, Engels, and Freud in turn, achieving a literary-philosophical status that no other work by Diderot shares. This edition offers a brand new translation of Diderot’s famous dialogue.

“The drunkard who comes out with an absurd order, the dreamer who suddenly wakes and with his bare hands strangles the woman sleeping beside him – are they perhaps not carrying out one of the Company’s secret decisions? These silent workings, so like those of God, give rise to all manner of speculation.”The affairs of Babylon are dictated by a lottery. Discreetly administered by a mysterious and seemingly omnipotent Company, the lottery can elevate citizens to positions of wealth and power or condemn them to the most shameful punishments. Taking this fantastical conceit as its starting point, Jorge Luis Borges’s short story is a characteristically brilliant achievement – a haunting mediation on the nature of chance, paranoia and divinity.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.”Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet is at once a denunciation of the mistreatment of Ireland’s poor and a daringly inventive comic rhapsody. Still shocking in its defiance of good taste and unrivalled in its evisceration of political hypocrisy, this is one of the greatest satires ever written.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

“No vices are so hard to eradicate as those which are popularly regarded as virtues. Among these the vice of reading is foremost.”A great American novelist offers a scathing attack on the worst kinds of reading. Edith Wharton argues that the growing cultural influence of “mechanical” readers is having a disastrous impact on the world of letters. A subtly devastating work of social criticism, The Vice of Reading is also a celebration of the voracious and amoral consumption that marks out the very best readers.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

“A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb.”In 1938 Mahatma Gandhi wrote a bracing and, at times, discomfiting essay on the claims of justice and nationhood in Palestine. Profoundly informed by its author’s sympathy for the plights of Jews and Arabs alike, this text is also uncompromising in its advocacy of the path of non-violence—even in the most challenging of circumstances. Justice in Palestine is an essential work by one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and authoritative voices.

“It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many”.A powerful lament for an imperilled way of life, the 1854 speech traditionally attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe is a vital document in the history of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Chief Seattle’s oration was delivered in the face of the impending loss of his people’s land to the State of Washington, and it remains a profound meditation on the nature of time, colonialism, and religion.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyond there-where men can see. From near Bogota, where there are a hundred thousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight." One of the acknowledged masters of speculative fiction, H.G. Wells conducts in this short story a disconcerting thought experiment. What would become of a community if its members were somehow deprived of sight? How would society evolve in the absence of the very concept of visibility? And what if, one day, a sighted outsider suddenly found himself in this country of the blind?

"We are going to Rome to scatter these words of liberty far and wide, words which for seven years have been forbidden like a crime. And with reason, for if they had been allowed, they would have shaken the Fascist tyranny to its foundations within a few hours." In 1931 the Italian poet Lauro de Bosis flew over Rome in a small plane in order to scatter anti-Fascist pamphlets from the sky. He did not survive the journey, but in Story of My Death he left behind a remarkable testament: a denunciation of Mussolini's regime and a refusal, even in the face of death, to abandon the cause of liberty.

“It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you”.James Baldwin was one of America’s most powerful analysts of the psychology of white supremacy. In this speech, delivered in 1965 at the Cambridge Union Society, he offers a devastating, but also strikingly empathetic, account of the role played by racism in American society.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

“Now one could imagine that the little front legs rubbed against each other lightly, joyfully. The horrible danger was over; it had escaped; it was ready for life again.”Deft, subtle, and bitingly ironic, Katherine Mansfield’s short story is a highly concentrated depiction of grief and cruelty. Taking as its narrative occasion a brief meeting between two bereaved fathers, The Fly remains an outstanding literary portrayal of the shadow cast by the First World War.