In July 2008, Cambridge University Press is publishing, under a different title, a slightly revised version of The Little Red Writing Book in the Unites States and the United Kingdom. I’m working on those revisions now.

There are two small books I’ll get to when I can. The first is a book about leadership, and what literature has to teach men and women who want to practise it. For some years, I used to teach a university program in leadership and organisational culture. I speak and train in this field still, and that work has sent me back to some ideas I used to trade in, and some texts I used to plunder for the purpose. David Whyte wrote a wonderful book called The Heart Aroused in a similar vein some ten years ago. I want…

My next work of prose (after the green book) is a book about the consolations of literature. A sort of cross between Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris and Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, my book, Reading Slowly at the End of Time is, in my mind, a tongue-in-cheek self help book for living the right life and doing the right things in an age when we may be running out of time to work that out. My argument will be, of course, that everything one needs to know about love, say, and the journey of sorrow, and the restoration…

I have almost enough good poems together now to make a book. That would be my first volume of poetry, and I’d like to see it published in the next year or so.

The Little Green Grammar Book does for grammar what The Little Red Writing Book does for style. The book, shorter than it’s red progenitor, and simpler, is due at the press at the end of January 2008. If I meet that deadline—and it’s going to be touch and go—the book should be out in October 2008 (UNSW Press).