The Quiet (ISBN 9781405037662) by meditation teacher Paul Wilson is published by Pan McMillan (in UK and Australia) and Tarcher/Penguin (USA). After first coming to prominence for this Eighties book on meditation, The Calm Technique Wilson revisited the topic with The Quiet - the result of 40 years of meditation practice and study, and the distillation of the major meditation approaches. The book claims to feature single, demystified practice that starts to deliver the benefits in just 13 minutes - the time it takes to make a cup of tea and drink it.

Wilson published The Little Book of Calm (ISBN 0140285261), a small book to help people in stressful situations to calm down. It distills Wilson's larger book "Instant Calm" and was written during a Zen seminar in Japan. Published by Penguin Books, the book is physically small, to enable readers to easily carry and use it. Reviews described it as "the first and still one of the best books aimed at counteracting stress". The book has been translated into 24 languages including Italian, French, and Mandarin Chinese

First released in 1997, the sales of The Little Book of Calm led to a number of copy cat small books. Wilson followed up the book with titles including The Little Book of Calm at Work in 1998, The Little Book of Sleep and The Little Book of Hope in 1999, and The Life Priorities Calculator in 2000, and "A Piece of the Quiet" in 2007. The book has a similar "feel good" message to "Wear Sunscreen", an essay by Mary Schmich which had a similar message to The Little Book of Calm, and later inspired a best-selling single by Baz Luhrmann.

References in popular culture

The book featured in numerous satires and parodies in the late Nineties, with cartoons regularly appearing in UK daily newspapers. The Little Book of Calm was featured in the first episode of the British comedy Black Books, when Manny Bianco accidentally swallowed a copy of it. The book is later absorbed into his body, and he is able to dole out helpful calm-inviting comments to passersby, such as "When you're feeling under pressure, do something different. Roll up your sleeves, or eat an orange". (Written by the screenwriters, not the book's author.)