Ray Robertson 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.

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.

A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death-and an argument for how it can make us happy.

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 band's evolution (and devolution) through their shows, from the R&B-based garage band at the beginning, to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak, to the lumbering monolith of their decline. In All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, Robertson listens to and writes ecstatically about fifty of the band's most important and memorable concerts in order to better understand who the Grateful Dead were, what they became, and what they meant--and what they continue to mean.

In Zeiten entgleisender Depressionen im öffentlichen wie im privaten Raum, schöpft Ray Robertson aus Literatur, Philosophie und seiner Biografie, um die Wertschätzung der Existenz zu rehabilitieren. Mit Verve und Humor rühmen seine Kapitel immerwährende Freuden, für die es sich zu leben lohnt – darunter naheliegende wie Freundschaft und Liebe, und näherliegende wie Rauschzustände und Besitztümer. Eine durch und durch reanimierende Kollektion. Philosophie, todernst und urkomisch Das Überlebensbuch für erschöpfte Egos Eigenes Vorwort für die deutsche Ausgabe