pickWhat a pleasure it was to read these 26 short stories for the first time. Saroyan writes with humor and emotion. He is known for his “free style” of writing, more concerned with conveying an idea, a tone, or an emotion than with the form a story takes.
He may not be as often read today as Steinbeck or Hemingway, but he is a distinct early to mid-20th century American voice who is well worth your time.
Full review: https://bit.ly/rvw-trapeze
"The man you write of need not perform some heroic or monstrous deed in order to make your prose great. Let him do what he has always done, day in and day out, continuing to live. Let him walk and talk and think and sleep and dream and awaken and walk again and talk again and move and be alive. It is enough."
"But I want to use language that will create a single implication. I want the meaning to be precise, and perhaps that is why the language is so imprecise."
- William Saroyan.
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
This sense of being out of time has driven thousands of people from their homes into moving-picture theaters where new universes appear before them, with emphasis on man and his major problem: a thing called, conveniently, love. The Sunday midnight shows do a thriving business, and the people go back to their homes, sick with the sickness of frustration; it is this that makes the city so interesting at night: the people emerging from the theaters
Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze: And Other Stories | 
