An unexpected little gem. I found this novel at a hock shop somewhere in buttfuck Manitoba. What attracted me to this piece of lit wasn't the author, nor the 80s movie starting Nick Cage, but the soundtrack for the latter; the score was composed by Peter Gabriel. Being somewhat of a Gabriel co...
John Tremont, a middle-aged man with a family, is summoned to his mother's bedside after she has suffered a heart attack. When he arrives, he finds her shaken but surviving; it is his father, left alone, who is unable to cope, who begins to fail, to slip away from life. Joined by his nineteen-yea...
Know Scumbler in his poignant, hilarious life. Get mad at him and even cry with him. Here's Don Quixote, Santa Claus, and Faust rolled into one "thick shadow" of a man. A joyous sixty-year-old American street painter lives on the Left Bank in Paris, making a living by creating rentable apartments...
The title brings to mind a luxury vessel on the most glamorous river in the world, but readers expecting to learn about the high life in France will be in for a surprise. In this charming memoir, painter and novelist Wharton (Birdy) instead gives us literally the nuts and bolts of building a hous...
In August of 1988, heavy black smoke engulfed an Oregon highway, causing a massive 23-car pileup that claimed the lives of novelist William Wharton's 36-year-old daughter, her husband, and their two infant daughters. They'd been victims of field burning, a routine agricultural practice, and were ...
We’re moving so fast they pile us into two ton trucks. We go along faster than tanks. Sometimes, we come to a town and there will be German civilians in them. There’s been no chance for the civilian population to evacuate. These towns have never been bombed. Some of them are still there, complete...
They seem to be legitimate from what I’ve learned but I’m uncomfortable with how the pending trial is out of our control. In the meanwhile, the correspondence continues. How much did Bert and Kate save? How much did the funeral cost? How much did the monument I commissioned cost? There are furthe...
There’s a new wind, a wind from the east. Thin bits of snow are flying in the cold air but it could be only from the trees or blown up off the ground. Mel’s on, waiting for me. It’s just getting dark. Next one will be two-man. I try to think up a new password. God, the whole business seems so rid...
No lion’s going to catch us way out here; lions are afraid of water.” Dad has the fishing poles we rented and he’s ahead of me. We’re walking out on a rickety old pier with boards missing so we can look right down into the water. Two days have passed since the lion escaped and killed that man in ...