Ray Robertson
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English
Description
Inspired by the exploits of ill-fated country-rock visionary Gram Parsons, this mid-60s tale of idealism and escape traces the trials of a fictionalized draft-dodging flower child from the United States to Canada and back. It is the late 1960s in Yorkville, Toronto's hippie ghetto of artists, intellectuals, drunken poets, and would-be rock stars. In this idyllic haven, narrator Bill Hansen, a drummer, meets Thomas Graham, an American musician on the...
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English
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Featured on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
Longlisted for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
"Clear-eyed ... Robertson is no stranger to confronting unsavoury truths."—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"Many of us sense that the world has too many moving parts and can become utterly defeated. Ray Robertson...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
Longlisted for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
"Clear-eyed ... Robertson is no stranger to confronting unsavoury truths."—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"Many of us sense that the world has too many moving parts and can become utterly defeated. Ray Robertson...
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English
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Description
"He who would teach men to die would teach them to live," writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to Die: A Book on 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...
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English
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"Undefeated by decades of rent increases and declining readership, Phil Cooper's secondhand bookstore finally succumbs to COVID-19 and he reluctantly decides to move the business online. In the newfound quiet of cybercommerce, he starts to suspect he's been smoking a little too much pot, listening to a little too much Grateful Dead, and may be overdue on sorting out who he is and what he's doing here, and where, in fact we might all be going. So he...
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Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and lives in Chatham. Set in the year that real newspaper headlines told of the rise of Reagan and North America's hard turn to the right, 1979 is a novel of innocence not so much lost as smashed, and experience gained the hard way, the kind that brands memories forever and permanently changes lives.
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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...
8) Heroes
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English
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Peter Bayle-heavy drinker, philosopher, scholar, anemic lover-is in Kansas, writing a feature on middle America's newfound love for hockey. There he meets a morphine-injecting reverend, a reviled reporter, and a drug salesman; obsessed by his self-destructive new friends, Bayle abandons the project and returns home to confront a future and a girlfriend he may no longer want.
9) David
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English
Description
Born a slave in 1847, but raised as a free man by the Reverend William King, David has rebelled against his emancipator and his predestined future in the church. He's taken up residence in the nearby town of Chatham, made a living robbing graves, and now presides-in the company of a German ex-prostitute named Loretta-over an illegal after-hours tavern. These days that final, violent confrontation with Reverend King seems like a lifetime ago. The residents...