Ours is an ill-mannered society that wears those bad manners as a badge not just of its moral rectitude but of its millenarian ethical ambitions. At the same time, in no society in recent memory have people been so easily affronted.

At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff's essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world's most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics--in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression.

The essays that appear in Desire and Fate serve both as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship in contemporary publishing, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, they are all characterised by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking. Together they confirm Rieff's status as an indispensable writer and thinker.

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke first met in 1900 at the Worpswede artists' colony--a focal point of the kind of artistic innovations that were set to transform twentieth-century European culture. Modersohn-Becker and Rilke went on to enjoy an intense friendship over a period that saw both of them having to confront personal and financial challenges as they pursued their artistic vocations. This friendship was cut short by Modersohn-Becker's tragically early death in 1907, but it left in its wake a remarkable series of letters.

As fascinating and evocative when discussing the nature of married life and the difficulty of furnishing one's home as they are when exploring the expressive possibilities of art and poetry, the letters exchanged by Modersohn-Becker and Rilke are a testament to both correspondents' exceptional descriptive gifts and penetrating social intelligence.

Brought together in English for the first time here and introduced by an illuminating essay by the art historian Jill Lloyd, The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence provides a fascinating view of everyday life during an exceptionally fertile and exciting period of cultural production.

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.

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'...

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.

Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.

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.

Hungry Ghosts sees the prize-winning poet Gabriele Tinti collaborate with the acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen on a unique artistic engagement with the furthest edges of life and consciousness. Drawing inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition, Hungry Ghosts is a thrilling evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.

Taking as their starting points the simplest of media--respectively the brief epigraphic verse and the photographic negative--Tinti and Ballen have produced something truly extraordinary: a masterfully crafted series of poems in dialogue with a stunning array of phantasmagoric images. Tinti's verse has become renowned for its combination of rigorous sparseness on the level of diction with imagery of an extraordinary power and resonance. These qualities are once again much in evidence in Hungry Ghosts, but Tinti's response to Ballen's brilliant and disquieting works has also led him to explore an entirely new terrain: the uncanny borderlands between life and death.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

We live in an age of ever-deepening anxiety. Free of convictions, released from certainties, we appear untethered--and alone. The values that underpinned our sense of, and need for, collectivity have been reduced to their lowest common denominator: liberty means nothing more than exploiting our individuality; equality has become an empty political slogan; as for solidarity, it's nowhere to be seen.

Such ruptures are neither accidental nor benign. The not-so-brave new social mandates are outgrowths of globalisation's casualties: complete eclipsing of political sovereignty, gradual weakening of national identities, and breakdown of the welfare state. The situation is one of crisis.

In this revelatory contribution to political science and sociology, Constantine Tsoucalas draws upon a wide range of philosophical discourses to understand and diagnose our anxious, opiate-seeking age, and to suggest that identity and difference have been incorporated into the deepest substratum of capital, culminating in our times' greatest woe: the extreme fetishization of the self.

This second edition includes a new introduction from the author and is a revised translation.

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.

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.

In July 1980 London's National Gallery paid a record sum for a canvas that purported to be Peter Paul Rubens's Samson and Delilah (1609). But as the artist and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis has long maintained, the painting is not the work of Rubens at all, but rather a copy of his original. Notwithstanding the formidable body of historical and stylistic evidence that supports Doxiadis's assessment, the National Gallery has not only continued to defend its attribution of the canvas to Rubens, but it has also refused to allow a thorough, independent analysis of the painting's material structure.

In NG6461: The Fake Rubens, Doxiadis gives a riveting account of her own investigations, and of her efforts--often in the face of hostility and ridicule--to convince the British art establishment of the truth about Samson and Delilah. But the implications of this case extend well beyond the authorship of a single painting. At a time when major galleries in continental Europe and the United States are opening themselves up to innovative research methods and to a broader spirit of open-minded enquiry, some of the most influential figures in Britain's cultural life are insulating themselves from these trends--very often prioritising face-saving and the maintenance of opaque social networks over the legitimate interests of the art-loving, and tax-paying, public. NG6461: Copy in the Manner of Peter Paul Rubens is an unforgettable account of what has gone wrong in the art world.

In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda's Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda's essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as a remarkably timely warning against the seduction of modern intellectuals by tribal loyalties and antipathies.

Rather than detaching themselves from communal ties as their forebears had done, Benda argues that twentieth-century European intellectuals willingly subordinated the disinterested pursuit of truth to the servicing of group interests (particularly the interests of their own nations and social classes). Partisan agendas had a corrosive effect not only on moral and political philosophy, but also on the writing of history and fiction. With its penetrating analyses of nationalism and of the tensions between group identity and intellectual freedom, Treason of the Intellectuals is as necessary a book in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

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.