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. (New Directions Publishing)