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 burned alive in their van. How could such a thing happen? And how could a father come to terms with such a loss? Ever After, Wharton's first memoir, is his search for answers to these questions, written with the inspired simplicity that won him great acclaim for his novels.

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 out of the most unlikely spaces. Mostly, however, he paints with utter delight in the creative act and discovers remarkable characters along his path: crafts-men, students, prostitutes, motorcyclists. He scumbles and fails. He digs twisting tunnels under Paris streets and builds nests: nature nests, rats' nests, birds' nests. He collects clocks and designs his own life from the "inside." Wanting to be true beyond honesty, visible past seeing to being, Scumbler scrambles, tumbles, rumbles, rambles through the ecstatic pleasure of creation and the pangs of ordinary existence.

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 houseboat, along with generous dollops of humor and local color. As a struggling artist in Paris with his schoolteacher wife and four children, Wharton decided to build his own boat after visiting that of an acquaintance in the mid-1970s. He recounts the family's adventures in making their dream come true. They gave up their Paris flat and moved onto the boat, which docked 12 miles downriver from Paris at Le Port Marly. There they spent the next 25 years adding the finishing touches. The most poignant moment comes at the wedding of oldest child, Kate, aboard ship. The author reminds us that she, her husband and their two children were to perish in 1988 in an Oregon fire, a tragedy he recounted in Ever After. Some readers might have preferred learning more about life aboard the boat than about the details of building it, but this work will satisfy Wharton devotees and Francophiles alike. (Jun.)

This love story, by the author of Birdy and Dad, is set in Paris in 1975. Jack, 49, and American, has walked out on his fast-lane corporate career and troubled marriage to return to his first love, painting. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris, struggling to express his long-suppressed feelings through his art. While painting in the park (and blocking the sidewalk), an elderly blind woman walks into him, knocking him off his feet and getting herself smeared with paint. Mirabelle, 71, is small, elegant, and radiant. They fall slowly, carefully, and improbably in love, and into a tender physically passionate affair. While Mirabelle's tremendous sense of life inspires Jack to paint with new vision and freedom, he shares with her the mysteries of passion, and frees her from the traumatic event that blinded her in childhood.

During the Depression, a 10-year-old boy befriends a carnival stuntman and his lion cub and learns about the meaning of family, loyalty, love, and survival.

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-year-old son, John suddenly becomes enmeshed in the frightening, consuming, endless minutiae of caring for a beloved, dying parent. He also finds himself inescapably confronting his own middle age, jammed between his son's feckless impatience to get on with his life and his father's heartbreaking willingness to let go. A story of the love that binds generations, Dad celebrates the universe of possibilities within every individual life.

Szrapnel to osobista opowieść o wojnie widzianej oczami osiemnastoletniego żołnierza. Druga wojna światowa dla Williama Whartona jest pasmem udręk, w którym nie ma miejsca na bohaterstwo. Szrapnel to swojego rodzaju spowiedź autora, zbiór opowieści, którymi nigdy nie dzielił się nawet z najbliższymi. Opowieści śmiesznych, choć i tragicznych, zmuszających do zastanowienia się nad absurdalnością wojny. Wharton jak zwykle pisze ciepło, po ludzku, przemawiając prosto do serc czytelników. [wyd.Salamandra, 1996]

Set in the Ardennes Forest on Christmas Eve 1944, Sergeant Will Knott and five other GIs are ordered close to the German lines to establish an observation post in an abandoned chateau. Here they play at being soldiers in what seems to be complete isolation. That is, until the Germans begin revealing their whereabouts and leaving signs of their presence: a scarecrow, equipment the squad had dropped on a retreat from a reconnaissance mission and, strangest of all, a small fir tree hung with fruit, candles, and cardboard stars. Suddenly, Knott and the others must unravel these mysteries, learning as they do about themselves, about one another, and about the "enemy," until A Midnight Clear reaches its unexpected climax, one of the most shattering in the literature of war.

Hailed upon its publication as "a classic for readers not yet born" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel about friendship and family, dreaming and surviving, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, "birdness." It tells the story of Al, a bold, hot-tempered boy whose goals in life are to life weights and pick up girls, and his strange friend Birdy, the skinny, tongue-tied perhaps genius who only wants to raise canaries and to fly. While fighting in World War II, they find their dreams become all too real—and their lives are changed forever. In Birdy, William Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane.

A welcome reissue of this wartime classic from the author of Birdy. During WW II, a dying American soldier, William Wiley, and his German captor, Wilhelm Klug, are miraculously rescued by a fox endowed with extraordinary powers, Franky Furbo. For William, the experience is indisputably true but when he discovers later that neither his wife nor children believe in Franky, he endures a crisis of faith and searches desperately for the truth. Franky Furbo is a modern fable with a remarkable twist, quite unlike anything Wharton wrote before or since.

In Tidings, one of America's best-loved authors paints a vivid scene of an unusual family Christmas. At an old mill in the French countryside, philosophy teacher Will and his wife Loretta await the return of their four adult children for the Christmas holidays. The house is swept, the fire is lit, and the scene is set. Will is determined to make this a Christmas to remember; however, he is unprepared for the personal troubles each family member will bring to the festivities. Unsatisfied desires, affairs, and the shadow of divorce threaten the Yuletide cheer. As they struggle to resolve their issues, the family and their holiday celebrations come alive in a heart-warming evocation of the traditions, magic, and unseen labour for a family Christmas.

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 burned alive in their van. How could such a thing happen? And how could a father come to terms with such a loss? Ever After, Wharton's first memoir, is his search for answers to these questions, written with the inspired simplicity that won him great acclaim for his novels.

The author reflects on his family’s decision to live on a houseboat on the Seine, detailing the renovation of a crippled vessel, the excitement and adventure experienced by his family, and the French lifestyle.