Following in the tradition of Ghost Rider and Traveling Music, Rush drummer Neil Peart lets us ride with him along the backroads of North America, Europe, and South America, sharing his experiences in personal reflections and full-color photos. Spanning almost four years, these 22 stories are open letters that recount adventures both personal and universal - from the challenges and accomplishments in the professional life of an artist to the birth of a child. These popular stories, originally posted on Neil's website, are now collected and contextualized with a new introduction and conclusion in this beautifully designed collector's volume. Fans will discover a more intimate side to Neil's very private personal life and will enjoy his observations of natural phenomena. At one point, he anxiously describes the birth of two hummingbirds in his backyard; at the same time, his wife is preparing for the birth of their daughter - a striking synchronicity tenderly related to readers. A love of drumming, nature, art, and the open road threads through the narrative, as Neil explores new horizons, both physical and spiritual. This is the personal, introspective travelogue of rock's foremost drummer, enthusiastic biker, and sensitive husband and father. Far and Away is a book to be enjoyed again and again, like letters from a distant friend.

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough) Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he?s sold thousands of his books in the streets, published and edited magazines, trained insurgents in his Poetry Boot Camps, and started Canada?s first Small Press Book Fair. Where the media focusses only on the glamorous literary lives of its few superstars, Ross gives us a glimpse into How Writers Really Live. In Confessions, he declares himself the King of Poetry, explores his floundering Jewish identity, wanders into the best bookstore in Canada, offers a crash course in avoiding writing, pisses off his publishers, runs a renegade Canada booth at the International Book Fair in Managua, and begs egomaniacal young writers to stop bugging the hell out of him. Many of these essays are culled from Ross?s bimonthly ?Hunkamooga? column in Word: Toronto?s Literary Calendar. Others are written specifically for this collection. Praise for Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer: "From big-budget movies to reality television to pre-fab pop music, our culture often celebrates idiots while relegating truly engaging artists to the margins or the poorhouse. Ross is one of those mostly disenfranchised voices, shouting eloquently from the literary attic ... Ross is a chapbook champion because the tiny tracts are 'a slap in the face to Mike Harris and Jean Chr?tien and McDonald?s and Knopf and MuchMusic and Greg Gatenby and cellphones and Republicans and Indigo and all the other stops along the Axis of Evil.' No reformed baby boomer or slumming trust-funder, Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn?t about flowers and meadows, it?s about blood and guts." (Quill & Quire) "Confessions derives from columns Ross wrote for Word, a monthly tabloid that lists events in the Toronto literary counterculture but is itself so hard to find that it's virtually covert if not downright clandestine. He ruminates on the psychology of small-press folk, suggesting common ground with those who 'canvass for a progressive political candidate who has no chance of winning the riding'. He also tells us a lot about the political economy of self-employed poets as well as the personality disorders that result from seeing 'crappier writers than me get more attention'. All writers have such feelings at times. Ross majors in them, with a minor in insulting his betters." (The Georgia Straight) ??this is writing that works because, as with all good confessions, it?s from the heart but comes by way of the brain.? (Vancouver Review)

A poignant meditation on mortality from a beloved Canadian poet A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and "real" in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss. Written during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the sudden death of his brother left him the last living member of his family and as a catastrophic diagnosis meant anticipating the death of his closest friend, this meditation on mortality - a kind of literary shiva - is Ross's most personal book to date. More than a catalogue of losses, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers is a moving act of resistance against self-annihilation and a desperate attempt to embrace all that was good in his relationships with those most dear to him.

Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross's Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice - this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart's notorious "Hunkamooga" column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublished work. Here they are together in their offbeat brilliance: snarky, provocative, funny, outlandish, and self-deprecating, these "confessions" are urgent dispatches that disrupt the too often polite conversation concerning Canadian literary matters. In these pages, Ross says what so many others only think. Praise for Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer: "For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it's difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross's latest effort. ... Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn't about flowers and meadows, it's about blood and guts." (Steven Knight, Quill & Quire) "... a wonderful book-funny, outrageous, and acute. I'll even say it's the best short-essay collection about the writing life that I've read in ages. ... Every aspiring writer should read Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, just to find inspiration. And so should every established writer-just to keep humble." (Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review) "Of greatest interest ... are the postscripts that follow many of Ross' essays. Of particular note are those endnotes which deal with the results of his publishing certain columns-such as losing his publisher, or losing friends from the writing community. This fallout, however, may have been expected as Ross is frequently acerbic and trenchant in his criticism, but no less witty or correct for being so." (Stephen Cain, Canadian Literature)