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“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.

“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.

"My entire poetic production is founded upon Wittgenstein's later writings. Although it has sat on my shelf for decades, I never actually read the Tractatus. But I always loved the idea of it; I am a conceptual writer, after all."-- Kenneth GoldsmithA major philosophical work, one of the most important written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is Ludwig Wittgenstein's attempt to conquer reality through logic. Written as a series of precisely numbered propositions, it elucidates the relationship of language to logic and to reality, ending with an infamous statement of breathtaking clarity: "What can be said at all, can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over to silence".Originally conceived as part of ERIS's Marginalia series of hand-annotated classics, this special edition consists of sixty-two original artworks inspired by the famous tract. Collages, drawings, sketches, handwritten comments, blacked-out and blanched text, shopping receipts and scans-within-scans-these are some of the techniques that appear in the pages of this book.Kenneth Goldsmith, on his maiden voyage into the unforgiving rigour of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, shows no appetite for timidity. His works, placed side-by-side with the original text, reveal the breadth and depth not just of its original author's genius, but also of the intervening artist's creative fervour. This is a unique book, beautifully presented in large bound format, and including a handwritten afterword by the artist.

“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.

“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.

“I know the same day made me free, which was the last day for him who made the proverb true—One must be born either a Pharaoh or a fool.” Best known as a philosopher and tragedian, in Apocolocyntosis Seneca also produced one of classical literature’s greatest satires. Depicting a posthumous trial in which the recently deceased Emperor Claudius makes the case for his elevation to the company of the gods, this short work brilliantly skewers the pretensions and corruptions of power.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

“I found it terrible, yet at the same time touching, for in all the years of the war I had not seen so perfect and pure an expression of bliss on any German face.”An ostensibly whimsical story about the adventures of a Berlin art dealer, Stefan Zweig’s The Invisible Collection is a powerful evocation of the condition of Germany between the wars. When Zweig’s anonymous narrator sets off to the provinces in search of a lucrative bargain, he finds himself caught up in the slow unfolding of a family tragedy—and is confronted with a unique reminder of the power of art…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?

This boxed set is a unique publishing event that brings together three interrelated volumes by one of the most influential and distinguished scholars currently at work in the humanities. In studies of painters as varied as Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Matisse, Michael Fried has transformed the ways in which we understand artistic form and technique, while his exceptionally insightful literary-critical work has been enriched by his own practice as a highly accomplished poet. This new collection of Fried’s writings is imbued with the distinctive combination of perceptiveness, imagination, and analytical rigour that he has brought to bear on aesthetic artefacts throughout his career. It also serves as a very personal record of its author’s intellectual and critical formation.The first volume, The Antithetical Imperative and Other Essays, places some of Fried’s most recent work alongside selections from his earlier writings. Ranging in topic from Manet to Pollock, these essays exemplify the acumen and aesthetic sensitivity that make their author one of the great critics of our time. The second volume, The Edge of the Table: Prose Poems, is a collection of exquisitely constructed prose poems accompanied by photographs by James Welling. Finally, the third volume, Exit Interview, is an autobiographical text that, as well as retracing the development of the arguments and ideas that informed such groundbreaking works as Absorption and Theatricality and Manet’s Modernism, proves wonderfully attentive to both the personal and institutional contexts of intellectual labour.

"I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust." Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In Unpacking My Library he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as a book collector and on the strange relations that spring up between objects and their owners. Witty, erudite and often moving, this book will resonate with bibliophiles of all kinds.

“I invent the most hopeless sounding plots; very often they are based on something I’ve read in a newspaper. And people say, ‘Oh, this is all nonsense’—and then the Russians come along in Germany and shoot people with potassium cyanide pistols.”Between them, Ian Fleming and Georges Simenon created two of the best-known heroes of modern fiction. In this illuminating dialogue, the authors who gave us James Bond and Jules Maigret discuss (among other things) their approaches to the craft of writing, the origins of their characters’ names, and the critical reception of their novels. It is essential reading for admirers of either man’s work.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 towering figure in the worlds of literature, cinema, and visual art, Jean Cocteau was one of the most influential creative artists of the twentieth century. In this collection of brief—often aphoristic—meditations, he reflects on the nature of beauty itself. Ranging over painters, poets, and musicians, Cocteau offers brilliant insights into the essential loneliness of the artistic vocation. As well as throwing new light on the author’s own creative achievement, Secrets of Beauty is a vital contribution to aesthetic theory