ERIS gems
ERIS gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
The Fly
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2024 • Extent: 16 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781916809772 • £5 ORDER
“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.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
On Being Ill
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2024 • Extent: 30 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781916809796 • £5 ORDER
“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.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Justice in Palestine
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2024 • Extent: 20 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781916809888 • £5 ORDER
“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.
LAURO DE BOSIS
Story of My Death
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 16 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475872 • £5 ORDER
“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.
BARON D’HOLBACH
Essay on the Art of Crawling
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 14 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475827 • £5 ORDER
“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.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Unpacking My Library
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 22 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475841 • £5 ORDER
“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.
IAN FLEMING & GEORGES SIMENON
The World of Bond and Maigret
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 32 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475858 • £5 ORDER
“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.
TONY JUDT
The Glory of the Rails
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 24 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475834 • £5 ORDER
“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 rail travel 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.”
H. G. WELLS
The Country of the Blind
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 60 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475810 • £5 ORDER
“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?
BRAM STOKER
Dracula’s Guest
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 32 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475797 • £5 ORDER
“I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain.”
In this intriguing literary fragment—published seventeen years after Bram Stoker’s most famous novel—an English visitor to southern Germany suffers a terrifying ordeal on Walpurgis Nacht: the night when, according to local tradition, supernatural horrors are set free to walk the earth. But perhaps most chilling of all is the appearance of a mysterious telegram purporting to guarantee the Englishman’s safety, a telegram sent by a certain ‘Dracula’…
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Invisible Collection
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 36 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475865 • £5 ORDER
“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 out for 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…
JONATHAN SWIFT
A Modest Proposal
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2023 • Extent: 24 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475803 • £5 ORDER
“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 ragout.”
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Lottery in Babylon
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2023 • Extent: 18 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475803 • £5 ORDER
“Like all men in Babylon, I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave.”
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.
CHIEF SEATTLE
The 1854 Oration
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2023 • Extent: 10 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475391 • £5 ORDER
“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. It is also a profound meditation on the nature of time, colonialism, and religion.
JOHN BERGER
A Load of Shit
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2023 • Extent: 10 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475414 • £5 ORDER
“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 engaged with the inescapable stuff of life—on shit as an allegory of what it means to be human.
EDITH WHARTON
The Vice of Reading
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2022 • Extent: 24 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475773 • £5 ORDER
“No vices are harder to eradicate than 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.
SENECA THE YOUNGER
Apocolocyntosis
Saddle-stitched booklet • Published: 2023 • Extent: 32 pages • Trim: 11 x 19.5 cm • ISBN: 9781912475421 • £5 ORDER
“I am not going to be diverted by either fear or favour. I shall tell the unvarnished truth. If anybody asks me where I got my information, I say at once, I’ll not answer if I don’t want to. Who is going to make me?”
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.