Ray Robertson: 8 books

“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...

"Ray Robertson is an irrepressible voice, with brass balls and a heart of gold."—Jonathan EvisonPeter 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...

“The days of poets moping around castle steps wearing black capes is over. The poets of today are amplified.” - LEONARD COHEN Picking up where Samuel Johnson left off more than two centuries ago, Ray Robertson’s Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) offers up an amplified gathering of thirteen...

crosses genres, and will appeal to a wide audience: self-help, literary, essays, philosophy, psychology author suffers from serious depression related to OCD. This book came out of a suicidal period, when he came up with a list of fifteen reasons why he should not kill himself. Or, more optimistically,...

From critically acclaimed novelist Ray Robertson comes a rollicking Great Gatsby of the 60s – a sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll-suffused modern tragedy. As Bill Hansen recounts the rise and fall of Thomas Graham and his musical vision, he simultaneously tells the story of frustrated idealism and the passing of an entire generation.

The setting (in Chatham, Ontario) is underdiscussed, but hugely important to the history of the US slave trade Connects to history of the Underground Railway Ray Robertson received excellent Canadian coverage for his latest book with Biblioasis, is an extremely personable reader, and...

It’s 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small working- class city of Chatham, Ontario. So far, so normal. Except that Tom’s dad is the local tattoo artist, his mother is a born-again former stripper who’s run off with the minister from the church where the pet store used...

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,...