Böcker av Ray Robertson

“Robertson offers the whole picture, warts and all. In doing so, he honors the music of artists who have enriched his life—and opens the door for his readers to experience the same magic.”—Blues Blast MagazineDust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) is a collection of a dozen biographical and critical portraits of some of the twentieth century’s most innovative, influential, and fascinating musicians. From rock to folk, blues to gospel, country to the unclassifiable; from the famous, to the forgotten, to the barely known, Ray Robertson combines a novelist’s eye for dramatic detail with an unapologetic fanboy’s appreciation for and awe at the lives and lasting artistic achievements of twelve of his musical heroes, among them Alex Chilton, Duane Allman, Nick Drake, and Muddy Waters.

"A dazzling tour of the fifty best and most important Grateful Dead concerts A Grateful Dead concert, argues Ray Robertson, is life: alternately compelling and lackluster; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. And usually all in the same show. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the same 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 their unorthodox early decision to record every one of their concerts, it's now possible to follow the band's evolution (and devolution) through nearly thirty years of shows, from the R&B-based garage band at the beginning, to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak, to the lumbering, MIDI-manacled monolith of their decline. In All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, Robertson listens to and writes about fifty of the band's '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."--

Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Smallis the story of one mans reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life.What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldnt 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 hes overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what were all doing here. So hes 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 whats 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 mans reckoning with both wry humour and tender joy, reminding us of what it means to live, love, and, when the time comes, say goodbye.

A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death-and an argument for how it can make us happy.

In his first book of poetry, Robertson's singular touch is punchy movement and clean musicality. 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.