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 lam from the draft. The two form a band, but even as they revel in music and freedom, Graham is hobbled by another love: a drug habit that becomes his reason for living and, eventually, for dying. Graham's emotional trip and failed, revolutionary life reflect the rise and fall of an entire generation's aspirations.

Moody Food

Literature & Fiction

Robertson, Ray

World Literature

Doubleday, Canada

Poetic, poignant and clever, What Happened Later is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book. In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of On the Road, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Late that summer, accompanied by his friend, Joe Chaput, Kerouac set out for Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, on a spiritual quest to connect with his French-Canadian roots. Predictably, the trip was a drunken, chaotic disaster, and a little more than two years afterward, Kerouac was dead. 
Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger-than-life-myth of Jack Kerouac, a working-class, small-town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarked upon his own quest -- to own a copy of On the Road. 
Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, and also begins to comprehend his own French-Canadian heritage. 
Taking its title from Kerouac himself -- What Happened Later was the title of his proposed sequel to On the Road, -- this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac's famous book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author. Interweaving the story of one author's slow decline with one boy's literary coming of age, What Happened Later explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.

What Happened Later

Literary

Thomas Allen Publishers

What Happened Later: A Novel

God and whiskey have got me where I am. Too little of the one, too much of the other.--David King, Chatham, Canada, 1895. Born a slave in 1847, but raised as a free man on the world-renowned, African-American Elgin Settlement near present-day Chatham, Ontario, David King is a man whose life has been defined by his violent rebellion against the very person who freed him--the Reverend William King. Far from the pulpit he was intended to fill as the Reverend King's anointed successor, David has lost his faith in God and humanity. He has also turned his back on both his past and his own people by abandoning the Elgin Settlement for nearby Chatham after a final, shattering confrontation with the Reverend King. Undoubtedly, the most unconventional man in town, David is also--thanks to his illegal after-hours tavern, Sophia's, and his highly lucrative grave robbing business--one of Chatham's richest citizens, white or black, and certainly its best read. Triggered by the news of the e

David

United States

Heroes tells the story of Peter Bayle - heavy drinker, philosopher, scholar, and anemic lover - as he visits a town in Kansas to write a story for Toronto Living magazine about the newfound love of middle-America for the quintessential Canadian game of hockey. During his research Bayle encounters a host of odd characters: a morphine-injecting reverend, a shunned reporter and his former crack-addict girlfriend, and a drug salesman with his sights set on a career as a cable mogul. The article never gets written, and as Bayle becomes more and more involved in the destructive behaviour of the friends and enemies he has made, his problems back home continue to build. His assignment long-since abandoned, Bayle returns to Toronto to face a future he does not want. It is a future obscured by a past he can’t let go of, but which he also can’t come to terms with.

Heroes

Dundurn Press

The "heart and soul" of almost all relational database programs is the B-Tree algorithm. In fact may programmers describe a relational database as a B-Tree program with supporting code that simply delivers the query to the B-Tree or displays the results from the B-Tree. The beauty of this book is that it describes in great detail with lots of diagrams and charts exactly how a B-Tree works. It is one of the clearest explanations on the subject existing and is extremely useful for any person or classroom that is investigating databases. The number of illustrations in this book are too numerous to list. Diagrams are given showing every major step taken in writing a B-Tree. The diagrams also show exactly how searches are done. Flow charts are also presented showing how the B-Tree algorithm works. Tables are presented showing the performance of the B-Tree. Code is listed for an entire B-Tree program written in simple DOS based BASIC and it is inspected and laboriously explained line-by-line.

B-Trees for BASIC

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Ross Books

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 lam from the draft. The two form a band, but even as they revel in music and freedom, Graham is hobbled by another love: a drug habit that becomes his reason for living and, eventually, for dying. Graham's emotional trip and failed, revolutionary life reflect the rise and fall of an entire generation's aspirations.

Moody Food: A Novel

Contemporary

Santa Fe Writer's Project

<div>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.</div>

The Old Man in the Mirror Isn’t Me: Last Call Haiku

Poetry

Exile Editions

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 &amp; 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.

Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Modern Music

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Biblioasis

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.

How to Die: A Book About Being Alive

Religion & Spirituality

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