ERIS gems – serie

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“The world’s humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization.”Stephen Leacock writes a masterful account of how humour works—and of how it very often doesn’t. As well as being remarkably insightful about the various ways in which a joke can fall flat, Humour as I See It is an exceptionally humane testimony from one of the English language’s most gifted humourists.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.

"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?

"Serpents and reptiles reach the heights of mountains and rocks, while the most fiery of steeds can never climb there."Baron d'Holbach's 1776 Essay on the Art of Crawling is a delicious satire on the sycophancy and self-abasement rife in the courts of Europe. A penetrating account of the workings of power that applies as much to today's courtiers as it did to those of the eighteenth century, it also makes a compelling case for the value of moral independence and personal dignity.

“More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.” In this brilliant essay the historian Tony Judt describes the singular contribution made by railways to the development of our shared way of life. From the transformation of urban spaces to the reorganisation of our sense of time, it is impossible to imagine the world we live in without the social and economic changes wrought by rail travel: no other mode of transport can represent with such potency “risk, opportunity, uncertainty, novelty, and change: life itself.”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 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.

“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.

"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.

“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.

“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.

“As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”At an ominous moment in American history, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC following President Trump’s second inauguration was a rare moment of moral clarity. Growing out of the most fundamental principles of Christian ethics, Bishop Budde’s address stands as a calm but resonant call for compassion in an increasingly vicious and punitive political culture.

“We cannot defend both the species’ right to exist and the right of individuals, since the survival of the species depends on the right to kill certain individuals.”In In Defense of the Bullfight, Francis Wolff makes a provocative argument against the view that bullfighting is the ultimate cruel sport. Far from being a ritualised means of inflicting needless suffering, Wolff suggests, bullfighting is infused with a rich and complex ethical code that contrasts with our pat intuitions about animal suffering. To take this code seriously is to appreciate at a genuinely profound level the relations between animals and humankind.

“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.

“It is a troublesome and difficult task that philosophy has in hand when it undertakes to cure garrulousness. For the remedy, words of reason, requires listeners; but the garrulous listen to nobody, for they are always talking.”Plutarch’s essay takes on an unusual philosophical problem: people who talk too much. In part an erudite and highly amusing history of the chatterbox as a social phenomenon, On Talkativeness also finds its way to the heart of much more serious issues—among them the nature of sociability and civic obligation. Careless talk, it turns out, really can cost lives, and quite possibly a great deal more.

“All we want is to aggrandize our own vainglory at second hand; and the less of real superiority or excellence there is in the person we fix upon as our proxy in this dramatic exhibition, the more easily can we change places with him, and fancy ourselves as good as he.”No one has ever written as well on political psychology as William Hazlitt, and his essay on the ludicrousness of monarchy shows him at his best. A champion of human equality during one of the most reactionary periods of British political history, Hazlitt here demonstrates with devastating force that the elevation of a single individual over his or her fellow citizens can only be justified by appeal to the least admirable of our collective fantasies.

“From this period, the intimacy between the Families of Fitzroy, Drummond, and Falknor daily increased, till at length it grew to such a pitch, that they did not scruple to kick one another out of the window on the slightest provocation.”Jane Austen’s juvenilia are widely admired both for their auguries of her future greatness and for the spirit of madcap surrealism that marks them out from her other work. Written when Austen was still an adolescent, Frederic and Elfrida is a witty and inventive parody that brilliantly sends up the conventions of romantic fiction.

“It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of a woman as he had it first from his mother."In some of the most densely packed pages that Freud ever wrote, the founder of psychoanalysis demonstrates through literary, mythical, and folktale examples the extraordinary way that wishes manifest themselves in people’s dreams and choices as inverted images. Magisterial and brilliant, this short essays also illuminates Freud’s own preoccupation with his daughter, Anna, at the time that he was writing it.

“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.

“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.

“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.