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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.

“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 Sixth Desert is a bold, propulsive literary epic—part family saga, part Hollywood tragedy, part American reckoning—unfolding in six self-contained but interconnected acts. Spanning Alta and Baja California, it moves backward in time from our fractured present to the antebellum South, excavating the myths, failures, and dark obsessions that have shaped America.

At its heart is Maximilian von Maar, a Hollywood scion who dreamed of making a masterpiece but instead became the most celebrated porn director of his time—fallen from grace, he is only capable of leaving wreckage in his wake. This first volume, The Director, follows the stranded souls still waiting for him in the desert, twenty years after production was supposed to begin.

A novel of great expectations and even greater failures, of broken marriages and lost children, of spectacle and collapse, The Sixth Desert is a panoramic vision of California as both paradise and illusion—the last edge of our familiar world, where image devours reality. Yet at the heart of this intricate machinery lies something startlingly simple: a love story, adorned, like a timepiece, with beautiful complications. Volume I collects parts 1-3 of the sextet.

“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.

A masterwork of poetic urban observation, The Stroller of Paris is Léon-Paul Fargue’s luminous love letter to the city he wandered, savored, and immortalized in prose. Long unavailable in English, this book opens the door to a Paris now spectral and half-forgotten—where the boulevards echoed with café banter, jazz and politics collided in salons, and the ghosts of Baudelaire and Montmartre's bohemians still haunted the mist.

Fargue was called “the stroller of Paris” not merely for his gait but for his gaze: intimate, encyclopedic, and electric. From the hidden depths of La Chapelle to the glitter of the Champs-Élysées, he guides us through arrondissements like a flâneur-philosopher—equal parts Proust and Apollinaire—seeking the soul of a city in every reflection, every voice, every shifting light.

Translated with uncommon sensitivity by Rainer J. Hanshe, The Stroller of Paris is not just a book about Paris—it is Paris, in all its bygone splendor and raw humanity. An essential rediscovery for lovers of literature, history, and the art of the dérive.

A masterwork of poetic urban observation, The Stroller of Paris is Léon-Paul Fargue’s luminous love letter to the city he wandered, savored, and immortalized in prose. Long unavailable in English, this book opens the door to a Paris now spectral and half-forgotten—where the boulevards echoed with café banter, jazz and politics collided in salons, and the ghosts of Baudelaire and Montmartre's bohemians still haunted the mist.

Fargue was called “the stroller of Paris” not merely for his gait but for his gaze: intimate, encyclopedic, and electric. From the hidden depths of La Chapelle to the glitter of the Champs-Élysées, he guides us through arrondissements like a flâneur-philosopher—equal parts Proust and Apollinaire—seeking the soul of a city in every reflection, every voice, every shifting light.

Translated with uncommon sensitivity by Rainer J. Hanshe, The Stroller of Paris is not just a book about Paris—it is Paris, in all its bygone splendor and raw humanity. An essential rediscovery for lovers of literature, history, and the art of the dérive.

“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.

“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.

“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.

Beowulf endures as one of the most powerful expressions of myth, memory, and mortal reckoning—a poem forged in a twilight world where monsters stalk the moors and glory is won at the edge of a sword. In this unique volume, acclaimed historianTom Holland takes up the poem with his pen at the ready.

Holland’s handwritten annotations—witty, insightful, and viciously funny—are reproduced here in exact facsimile. They range from editorial glosses and contextual asides to impassioned arguments, startled questions and moments of personal revelation. What emerges is a vivid encounter between past and present, literature and reader. Beyond merely an edition of Beowulf, this is a live record of what it feels like to read—closely, critically, and with wonder.

“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 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.

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.

“Someone rang my husband. Your wife is not well, the person said. Your wife is not well.”

When Clara’s parents transplant her from Paris to New York at the age of sixteen, a fleeting encounter with a young man seems, for a brief period, to open up new possibilities. As she strives to fulfil her vocation as a writer, and as she struggles in later years with the cumulative constraints of an unhappy marriage, Clara’s imagination is strangely haunted by a life that might have been.

Tracing Clara’s story from her adolescence to her experience of motherhood, and then through to a pivotal bid for freedom, Two Hours is an exceptional novel. Witty, perceptive, and profoundly humane, this is the work of a writer at the height of her powers.

"If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art."

In this sharp, uncompromising address, he defends the composer’s duty to the text: not to entertain, not to soothe, but to translate meaning with precision and depth. Music, he argues, must obey something higher than taste—something as exacting, and as rare, as truth itself.

“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.

Life is struggle. From the howling wilderness of the Yukon to the brutal arenas of man, White Fang is Jack London's savage and sublime masterpiece of survival, adaptation, and transformation.

Half wolf, half dog, White Fang is born into a world of ice, hunger, and violence—a creature of pure instinct shaped by the merciless laws of nature. But when he is thrust into the even more punishing world of humans—where cruelty wears a different face—his struggle becomes existential. Can the wild be tamed? And at what cost?

First published in 1906, White Fang is a fiercely intelligent novel of evolution and environment, of power and submission, of love as a force stronger than brutality. Inverting the arc of his earlier novel The Call of the Wild, London traces the journey not from civilization into wilderness, but from savagery toward domesticity—with all the tension, resistance, and poignancy such a path entails.

A radical, realist writer with the soul of a mythmaker, Jack London wrote White Fang at the height of his powers. More than a tale of a dog or a wolf, it is a parable of being—and becoming—in a world that demands constant transformation to survive.

“These trees, these plants I have written to you about have taught me all I needed to know about your death.”



B loves M, her favorite sister.



Then M is gone—taken too young, too suddenly, under the strange and quiet shroud of the pandemic. In the absence that follows, B sets out each day into the vast wilds of Griffith Park with her dog,
walking uphill and down in search of understanding, of peace, of reconciliation.



She talks to her sister in the language of the landscape, sports with her in the shape-shifting form of the wild animals
and plants of the park—rabbits, coyotes, snakes, owls, oleander, dodder, nettle, walnut. She leaves gifts—shells, stones, tokens of memory—and finds them answered in unexpected ways.



B now finds herself open to the mystery of change—willing to release old habits, weary truths, impossible expectations, and the comforting fictions of family. She revisits her life as an anxious and dutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, and artist,
pausing to linger, to glance sideways, to laugh. She walks onward, guiding us gently toward a place we all must reach—where much can be left behind and a new wisdom awaits. And then she writes.



Wild Things is the result: 59 letters to her sister, one for each year of her life, alive with grief, wonder, and transformation. A book about loss and about the radical clarity that comes when everything falls away––a luminous, unforgettable work.

“Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest.”

In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms, and the uses and abuses of criticism. Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.

This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa’s writings on art and poetic theory—most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers—thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.

“Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest.”

In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms, and the uses and abuses of criticism. Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.

This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa’s writings on art and poetic theory—most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers—thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.