2006 We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Collected Nonfiction

The Peach Orchard is a double CD released in 1998 by William Parker and a group of musicians he calls In Order To Survive. These musicians include Susie Ibarra, Rob Brown, and Cooper-Moore, with help from Assif Tsahar. This comes through courtesy of Aum Fidelity.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." So begins Joan Didion's legendary essay collection The White Album, a landmark literary mosaic by one of American writing's true greats illuminating in unerring prose subjects ranging from the Manson cult to the Black Panthers, from painter Georgia O'Keefe to the author's own struggles with depression and anxiety in the late 1960s.

Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs.