Search results for ""Author Ray Robertson""
Biblioasis Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Modern Music
"The days of poets moping around castle steps wearing black capes is over. The poets of today are amplified." -- LEONARD COHEN Picking up where Samuel Johnson left off more than two centuries ago, Ray Robertson's Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) offers up an amplified gathering of thirteen portraits of rock & roll, blues, folk, and alt-country's most inimitable artists. Irreverent and riotous, Robertson explores the "greater or lesser heat" with which each musician shaped their genre, while offering absorbing insight into their often tumultuous lives. Includes essays on Gene Clark, Ronnie Lane, The Ramones, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Townes Van Zandt, Little Richard, Alan Wilson, Willie P. Bennett, Gram Parsons, Hound Dog Taylor, Paul Siebel, Willis Alan Ramsey, and John Hartford.
£14.80
Exile Editions The Old Man in the Mirror Isn't Me: Last Call Haiku
Poems about getting old and not liking it. About getting high on Christmas Eve. About a hole in the sky where Toronto's landmark Honest Ed's used to be. About killing mosquitoes and petting strange dogs and a homeless man who feeds the pigeons who are always happy to see him. About tuning out and turning off and unplugging. About friends who've died and confused skyscrapers on foggy days and Nabokov in his underwear. About shame in the evening, regret in the morning, and, if there's time, a nap in the afternoon. About a world where the Clash is classic rock and experience killed curiosity and the corpse wondered what's next. And "Why I Am Not a Poet," an introductory memoir about growing up and becoming a writer in Toronto in the 80s and 90s—it's long gone bars, bookstores, and people—is a lively preface to the poetry.
£15.04
Santa Fe Writer's Project Moody Food: A Novel
0385259255
£11.39
Biblioasis How to Die: A Book About Being Alive
A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death—and an argument for how it can make us happy. “He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to Die: A Book about Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.
£12.33
Biblioasis 1979: A Novel
It’s 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small working- class city of Chatham, Ontario. So far, so normal. Except that Tom’s dad is the local tattoo artist, his mother is a born-again former stripper who’s run off with the minister from the church where the pet store used to be, and his sister can’t wait to leave town for good. And everyone along his daily newspaper route looks at him a little differently, this boy who’s come back from the dead, who just might be the only one who understands the miraculous, heart-breaking mystery that is their lives. Set in the year that real newspaper headlines told of North America’s hard turn to the right, 1979 offers a smalltown take on the buried lives of those who almost never make the news, and one boy’s attempt to make sense of it all.
£14.80
Biblioasis Estates Large and Small
Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man’s reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life.What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn’t do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and listening to too much Grateful Dead, he suspects that he’s overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what we’re all doing here. So he’s made another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy.Thankfully, he meets Caroline, a fellow book lover who agrees to join him on his trek through the best of what’s been thought and said. But Caroline is on her own path, one that compels Phil to rethink what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century. In Estates Large and Small Ray Robertson renders one man’s reckoning with both wry humour and tender joy, reminding us of what it means to live, love, and, when the time comes, say goodbye.
£13.79
Biblioasis I Was There the Night He Died
A mid-life crisis novel that reads like a Beat romp: think Kerouac, in his 50s, cooped up & caring for his dad Blend of fiction and philosophy with plain-spoken voice makes accessible, interesting, entertaining general reading Has demonstrated consistent sales growth in CDN & US sales David, though past its reviewing season, generated considerable interest from librarians, booksellers, professors, and the NPR staff at BEA NPR is interested in having Ray review/write essays for their website Fast-moving, funny read that is thoughtful and poppy Ray is Ray: funny, crude, philosophical, engaging. Hard-drinking, loud-talking, down-to-earth guy. Will appeal to same. The rejuvenating power of music is a big theme for Ray (as is mental illness/coping with death). Non-fiction angle could be taken on crossover music-arts programming, esp. for radio and/or magazines A good talker. This is the white guy with the handlebar moustache who in the past 8 months went on every black radio program that asked him to for David, whether they were religious shows or wanting to talk about the history of slavery. He kicked ass every time.
£14.99
Biblioasis All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows
A Grateful Dead concert, Ray Robertson argues, is life. Like life, it can be alternately compelling and lackluster; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the day Jerry Garcia’s heart did, what the band left behind is the next best thing to being there in the third row, courtesy of the group’s unorthodox decision to record all of their concerts. Meaning that it’s possible to follow the band’s evolution (and devolution) through their shows, from the R&B-based garage band at the beginning, to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak, to the lumbering monolith of their decline.In All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, Robertson listens to and writes ecstatically about fifty of the band's most important and memorable concerts in order to better understand who the Grateful Dead were, what they became, and what they meant—and what they continue to mean.
£13.79
