Estates Large and Small & Shimmer: Double Launch in Waterloo!
96 King St S
Waterloo, ON N2J 1P5
Canada
Come out and celebrate the Waterloo launches of Estates Large and Small by Ray Robertson (August 16, 2022) and Shimmer by Alex Pugsley (May 17, 2022)! After a reading from each book there will be a discussion between these two phenomenal authors, a Q&A, and, as always, a book signing! This event will take place at Words Worth Books in Waterloo, on Thursday, September 29 at 6PM ET.
Get your copy of Estates Large and Small here!
Get your copy of Shimmer here!
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.
Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, four collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His work has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.
In ten vividly told stories, Shimmer follows characters through relationships, within social norms, and across boundaries of all kinds as they shimmer into and out of each other’s lives.
Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they’re having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.
Alex Pugsley is a writer and filmmaker. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. He has been nominated for Canadian Comedy Awards, Hot Doc Awards, National Magazine Awards, and is a winner of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. His fiction has appeared in The Walrus, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications. His next book, The Education of Aubrey McKee, the second in a multi-part series, is forthcoming from Biblioasis.
