Ray Robertson

A Book about Being Alive

How to Die

An unlikely friendship sparked by marijuana and loneliness brings together a widowed writer and a teenage cutter who through music and their bond learn to confront painful losses. Original.

I Was There the Night He Died

A lively coming-of-age novel that records the collision of small town life with the earth-shattering news headlines of 1979.

A Novel

1979

“Ray Robertson is an irrepressible voice, with brass balls, and a heart of gold. I Was There the Night He Died is a hilarious, moving, insightful, and timely piece of modern realism, delightfully void of literary pretension. Here, at last, is a novel that rocks and rolls.”—Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving "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. Yet somehow, between a record player and a park bench, through late-night conversations about the deaths of Sam’s musical heroes, and ultimately through each other, Sam and Samantha learn to endure the things they fear most. Starring a 40-something writer who stumbles through the small town he thought he’d left behind forever, and a marooned teenager who wishes she were anywhere else, I Was There The Night He Died is a saucy, swaggering look at loss, love, and the redeeming power of music in the twenty-first century. Praise for Ray Robertson, A Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads Author, 2013 Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize, 2011 and the Trillium Prize, 2008 “Ray Robertson is the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American Letters.” —Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners “Both playful and profound, laced with insight from music to history, politics to literature, high to low culture.”—National Post “Robertson's art is as character-driven as Mordecai Richler's … he wants us all to behave better and doesn't care who he angers along the way.”—Globe and Mail

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

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.

What Happened Later

The author of What Happened Later documents his recovery from suicidal depression, a journey during which he explored what makes people happy and what makes life worth living, in an irreverent personal account that considers topics ranging from working-class life and death to intoxication and art. Original.

Fifteen Reasons to Live

Why Not?

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.

Estates Large and Small

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

Peter Bayle ? heavy drinker, philosopher, and scholar ? is assigned to visit a town in Kansas to write an article about hockey in Middle America.

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.

A Book About Being Alive

One of today's best young novelists, Ray Robertson is also one of its ablest critics. Mental Hygiene is a collection of his most entertaining, insightful, controversial, and funniest reviews and essays written over the last five years. Believing that ''writers have a responsibility to help maintain the mental hygiene of their time, '' Robertson, following in the footsteps of Mordecai Richler and other novelist-critics such as Anthony Burgess, Kingsley and Martin Amis and John Updike, is at the front line of contemporary literary debate. Whether castigating the bland cabal he refers to as McCanlit, poking fun at the trendy ephemera of intellectual fashion or arguing for his own unique fictional aesthetic, Robertson pulls no punches and suffers no fools

Ray Robertson

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