The little book on D. H. Lawrence (life and works in 50,000 words!), which follows my similar work on Byron in Reaktion's 'Critical Lives' series, has now made its extremely tedious way through the editing process and will be published in the Spring of next year. The delay was so long that I had time to write a critical book now called D. H. Lawrence Then and Now: An A to Z of Lawrence Studies (the title initially began with 'Phoenix Rising' but that was vetoed as too enigmatic). The publishers of this book are the same as those who did my Shakespeare and the Comic some time ago, and quite nicely too. It is arranged alphabetically with a topic under each letter, the aim being to provide a portrait of Lawrence that corrects some of the distortions critics like Leavis introduced and guard against those likely to emerge from the current revival of interest in him. Meanwhile I've been working hard to complete a theoretical book on comedy which I've had lying around for some time. I think it now has more focus: its provisional title is Philosophy's failures with comedy. If it has any antecedents in my previous writing, it would be the book I wrote on Frank Cioffi. When all this is finished, I hope to carry on re-reading my way through Dickens and, if I live long enough, write the occasional piece on him.
