What a delight to find seventeen of Saroyan’s uncollected stories within one cover!… charming tales, all blessed with Saroyan’s pixieish imagination and magical writing style… Even today they read as though they have been freshly minted from the Saroyan treasure house. A discovery for those who love Saroyan’s fiction; his spark is still wonderfully alive.

Library Journal

William Saroyan

William Saroyan (1908–1981) was born in Fresno, California. Famous for a long and voluminous career, he wrote novels, along with some sixteen story collections, and plays including The Human Comedy (winning an Academy Award for his screenplay), and The Time of Your Life, for which he won the Drama Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prizes. He wrote about “the archetypal Armenian families who inhabit Saroyan country, in and around Fresno, California. [And yet with their] unpredictable charm and wacky spontaneity … his characters overflow with so much human comedy that they transcend all ethnic boundaries, as in the stories of I.B. Singer” (The Chicago Tribune).

cover image of the book The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

“This book was first published October 15, 1934…,” William Saroyan wrote of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. “You will have to take my word for it that I believed the world would never be the same.” Certainly, it never was. Saroyan’s debut collection of stories made a tremendous splash in the literary world, adding an author in love with his own madcap sincerity to a pantheon full of serious-minded modernists. “A novel is a novelist,” he wrote, “and a short story is a short story writer.” Saroyan, who won (and then refused) the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life, always wrote about humanity, and always on a human scale. He was also one of the first American writers of this century to focus so much attention on immigrant communities. The protagonists sailing about The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze are often Armenian, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, African, or Irish; and all are treated with what The San Francisco Chronicle called “the old Saroyan luminousness, which is to say with an insight as fresh as that of an unusually perceptive child.”

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cover image of the book Fresno Stories

Fresno Stories

Eleven of William Saroyan’s most delightful tales, Fresno Stories spring straight from the source of the authors vision––“the archetypal Armenian families who inhabit Saroyan country, in and around Fresno, California. [And yet with their] unpredictable charm and wacky spontaneity…his characters overflow with so much human comedy that they transcend all ethnic boundaries, as in the stories of I.B. Singer” (The Chicago Tribune). Selected from New Directions’ collections of Saroyan’s early stories (The Man with the Heart in the Highlands) and his later work (Madness in the Family), Fresno Stories spans his whole remarkable career. “These stories shine with the old Saroyan luminousness, which is to say with an insight as fresh as that of an unusually perceptive child” (The San Francisco Chronicle).

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cover image of the book The Man with the Heart in the Highlands & Other Early Stories

The Man with the Heart in the Highlands & Other Early Stories

Gathered in The Man with the Heart in the Highlands are sixteen stories from William Saroyan’s most celebrated literary period, culled from several long out-of-print collections from the 1930s and ’40s, While achieving meteoric success with The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life, the young Saroyan set the pace with characters as fresh and compassionate as himself. His voice here is exhilarating, luminous, and completely distinctive––ready to let go with a lusty brash laugh on every page. These stories amply bear out Elizabeth Bowen’s opinion that “probably since O. Henry nobody has done more to endear and stabilize the short story.”

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cover image of the book Madness in the Family

Madness in the Family

William Saroyan, who burst upon the scene with his celebrated short-story collection The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), enjoyed a long and prolific literary career. Famous for his novels and plays (including The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life), he also published sixteen acclaimed story collections. “It came as something of a shock then, after the author’s death in 1981,” the editor Leo Hamalian notes, “to realize Saroyan hadn’t published a collection of his stories since 1956, a period of twenty-five years that also represents a full half of his writing life.” Gathered here are the finest of the masterly late pieces which appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s in the 1960s and ’70s.

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What a delight to find seventeen of Saroyan’s uncollected stories within one cover!… charming tales, all blessed with Saroyan’s pixieish imagination and magical writing style… Even today they read as though they have been freshly minted from the Saroyan treasure house. A discovery for those who love Saroyan’s fiction; his spark is still wonderfully alive.

Library Journal
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