Ray Robertson
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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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"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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"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...
5) David
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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...
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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.
7) Heroes
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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.
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Shortly after completing his sixth novel, Ray Robertson suffered a depression of suicidal intensity. Soon after his recover, he decided to try and answer two of the biggest questions we can ask. What makes humans happy? And what makes a life worth living? His answers aren't what you might expect from a mental illness memoir-but they're exactly what you'd expect from Ray Robertson. With the vitality of Nick Hornby and a brashness all his own, Robertson...
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"So," she says. "Who died tonight?"Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes....
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A Grateful Dead concert, Ray Robertson argues, is life.
Like life, it can be alternately compelling and lackluster; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the 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 the group's unorthodox decision to record all of their concerts. Meaning that it's possible to follow the...