Series: ERIS gems

"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...

A solitary railway signalman, stationed in a desolate cutting, begins to see a ghostly figure near the tunnel—each appearance heralding catastrophe. When a traveller stops to hear his story, the line between reason and forewarning blurs, and the tale gathers its terrible inevitability. In this unnerving masterpiece of atmosphere and compression, Charles Dickens turns from social realism to metaphysical dread,...

Europe, writes Aimé Césaire, is not civilised. It is decadent, stricken, dying. In this electrifying text, Western civilisation is stripped of its alibis and exposed as the foundation of modern brutality. What shocks is not the violence itself, but the clarity: fascism was not an aberration, but a return.

A young Abraham Lincoln confronts a danger more insidious than any foreign threat: the slow erosion of law from within. Written in the shadow of mob violence, this early speech is a chilling meditation on how republics decay: not by invasion, but by contempt for institutions, by complacency, by the rise of reckless ambition, by the people themselves.

A glance, a tram, a man chewing gum—and suddenly nothing holds. In this luminous story, Clarice Lispector captures the instant when the ordinary breaks open and the self no longer feels secure. What emerges is not drama but revelation: a world at once more alive and more unbearable.

A woman is told to rest. To obey. To stop thinking. What follows is one of the most unsettling descents in modern fiction. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic, the domestic interior becomes a site of quiet horror, where care turns to control and reason gives way to obsession. Short, precise, and impossible to forget, The Yellow Wallpaper is a story...

Why is a dog “Fido” but a bird “Peter”? In this brilliant short text, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows that the way we name animals reveals a hidden structure of thought. What looks trivial turns out to be a system: classification, metaphor, and how we place ourselves in the world, everything is at play. Clear, surprising, and quietly profound, this short essay...

We speak of rights. Simone Weil speaks of obligations. In this austere and devastating essay, she argues that justice does not begin with claims, but with what we owe to the vulnerable core in every human being. Against entitlement and abstraction, she offers something rarer: attention, restraint, and moral seriousness.

What happens when one of the clearest minds of the modern age turns on capitalism? In this brief, bracing essay, Albert Einstein argues that competition distorts democracy, corrodes education, and leaves human life precarious and small. Against it, he proposes something unfashionable: a society organized for cooperation rather than profit. In Why Socialism?, Einstein explores the flaws of a capitalist...

We don’t lack alternatives to Big Tech. We lack imagination. In this sharp, unsparing essay, Evgeny Morozov shows how we’ve reduced every problem to competition, forgetting how to build institutions that serve the public. Data, AI, infrastructure: all left to the market by default. The result is not inevitability, but failure of will. Beyond Big Tech is a call to...