I’ve been very busy this year. My son, Hector, was born in November, so it’s been a challenge writing with a newborn in the house — my office has become his nursery and I’ve started working from an office in a nearby building instead. I have a few projects to announce, though, which I’ll tell you about below.
First, though, I wanted to mention that if you want to receive updates from Amazon as soon as a new book becomes available, you can simply go to my author profile page and click on the follow button there. That’s a good way to make sure you don’t miss any new releases.
It’s unusual for an author to have two books published in the same year but, partly because of the knock-on effect of the pandemic, etc., I had one new book that came out in February and another that will be released in November.
Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor, from Yale University Press
How to Think Like Socrates, from St Martin’s Press
If you’re interested in the Socrates book, please consider preordering it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. When readers do that it encourages retailers to promote the book a bit more and helps it to reach a wider audience. (Amazon also have a preorder price guarantee that means you can have more chance to save money the earlier you order your copy!)
I also recently contributed a foreword to The Stoicism Workbook co-authored by my wife, Kasey Pierce, along with the clinical psychologists Scott Waltman and R. Trent Codd.
I will also be working on a new book soon for Princeton University Press with my friend, the classicist and translator, Lalya Lloyd. It will contain translations of two texts, one Greek and the other Latin, from Plutarch and Seneca respectively, both known as On Tranquillity. This will be the first time that both texts have been published in the same volume. I think it’s a great opportunity to compare the advice they give for coping with anxiety and developing emotional resilience — one from a Platonist and the other from a Stoic. I will be writing about how their advice compares to the sort of things we do in modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).
I’ve also been asked to record a series of audio lessons, and meditation exercises, for Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. These will explore how Stoicism can be used on a daily basis to develop emotional resilience.
Thanks for following me on Substack, and please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about these or other projects.
Regards,
Donald Robertson