Product Description
Here is Saroyan at the top of his form--the unmistakable voice in all its resonantvariety--setting out to tell the story of his life.

In superbly rendered scenes from his life as an orphan, schoolboy, newspaper-boy,messenger, fledgling writer, family misfit, world famous writer, man-about-town, husband, andfather, this book gives us the characteristic fluency of Saroyan at his best, and it introduces a newemotional depth that was to become a hallmark of the writer's later work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Time of Your Life- William Saroyan
I had to read this book for school.Boy am I glad I had to, I loved it.

Realistic period piece that re-lives an eraof yesteryear
I first became involved with this Pulitzer Prizeplay in college. I was a bright-eyed theatre major in deep East Texas. We were blessed with a throw-back of a man that lived his directorial adventures. Our seasonconsisted of the classics......Glass Menajerie, Our Town, Dark of the Moon,and a great play by Truman Capote, The Grass Harp.(his only play)

In thelate sixties we were taken on a trip with The Time of our Life that rivaledthe Timothy Leary escapades that filled the air with this soulfull story oflives crossing paths with eachother. The author's preface to the playtells of the destiny we carry as we impact the people we meet and seethroughout the time of our life. You create the plot fromvinnettes thatpass before your eyes like the music videos and sound bites we have come toexpect in this decade of speed.

Slow down, take your time, and escape toa world long gone by. You are the voyuer and casual observer at Nick's, onthe Embarcadero, in the sepiatone fog of San Francisco at the turn of thecentury. You relate to these characters as they 'strut and fret' theircommon lives in three acts. It is a play you will place on your bookshelfand cherish as a family album.

By the way, our production of the show wasselected one of ten in the nation to be honored in Washington, DC at Ford'sTheatre, and be recognized by the American College Theatre Festival/KennedyCenter. We were living large with an old story in a very 'new' time. ... Read more

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After being caught shoplifting, eleven-year-old Al feels humiliated and tries to recapture his self-respect. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Parsley Garden
This is a great story with a great indepth meaning. it challenges you to use your mind and to think, but it is an intelligent story for students in grade nine ... Read more

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Even though they know the painful consequences that await them, Aram and Joey cannot resist skipping school the day that the circus comes to town. ... Read more

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The whole voyald and other stories by William Saroyan
This is an absolutely lovely book as are the others I've read by William Saroyan. He was an American of Armenian origin. This book is short stories, full of wit, humor and human sensitivity. The copy I ordered arrived in very good condition. ... Read more

Product Description
WILLIAM SAROYAN CENTENNIAL EDITIONPublished for the centennial celebration of the iconic author s birth, this collection of William Saroyan s writings overflows with exuberance, explodes with flashes of pure brilliance and literary daring, and brings to life an Armenian American voice unique and unforgettable. A careful selection of known and loved short stories along with plays, novels, letters, essays, and previously unpublished works, this volume allows readers to discover afresh the many aspects of a complex, engaging, and sophisticated writer.Saroyan became an instant literary star in 1934 when Story magazine published The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and until his death, in 1981, he was prolific in many genres, and one of the first major American writers to address the immigrant experience. Time predicted at the end of his career that the ease and charm of many of his stories will continue to inspire young writers. It is a legacy beyond criticism. Dwelling variously in Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Fresno, Saroyan never lost sight of the importance and privilege of being a writer or the need to live life to the fullest: Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. Continually refreshing, forever remembered for the bravura of his words and the passion of his beliefs, William Saroyan holds his place among the greats with the greatest of ease. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Bill Rode Sunlight's Stream
Bill Rode Sunlight's Stream

He stood unbound, brilliant booming pitch
Daring fame's too short a lease to tire

An overworked Queen and a burst poet's appendix orphaned
Crazy uncles, old world advice, newspaper boy in Café's

Circulating telegraph messages on windy roads
While genocide visited the Armenian Night

He discovered San Francisco and New York
Flustered wasps, street walkers, huddled denizens

Gamblers, dancers, poor and burning Arabs, American foundation
All the way up and down the Malaga vines

He made Paris and Fresno come and go speaking brittle reflection
Rivers of lust and untaxed piping pride, stories in starring flight

He hung his hat tipped to the East
Witty wicked waste, soaked in passionate delight

Vye, Vye, Vye, he would intone, smiling like an onion's scrape
By a mortal bite of life foretold to insipid academigaudy scorn

I once heard him confess Shaw was his inspiration, not the rest
Hello out there! He said to whomever I myself will inspire

While Miller, Kerouac and Albee took their queues
To burst through the gates and wound the engenues

He was Saroyan to the end. A farmer's boy,
A poet's son, an observant crier of Our Town

Highlands and merchants pranced in his glare
Striking a portable typewriter, a machine gunner's flare

Channeling Whitman, funneling impressionist colors
Like butterflies captured on a punctured canvas

The daring young man, endless cartwheels in the sand

(Happy 100th Birthday William Saroyan:
Thanks for the chiseled world of words
that keep singing in my ears)

Bedros Afeyan
8-9-2008
San Diego, CA ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Honest Wisdom and Wit of Saroyan Shines
Armenian-American inhabitant William Saroyan, whose heday was between 1934-1940 in San Francisco, is a great America writer of human short stories. He is gifted in characterization, in his ability to capture emotions and interpersonal subtleties; he is also overflowing with a sort of honest wisdom from whose cup it is a pleasure, via reading his stories to drink. There are several great stories in this collection; Secrets of Alexandria is about two isolated moviegoers with movie stars and hoping to hook up but thwarted by events; The Brothers and Sisters tells of the disillusionment of a buff young guy in lust with an innocent hooker, who is accompanied to the mysterious site of his jealousy by a religious member of a family of wine merchants; The Living and the Dead hilariously recounts the commentary of an Armenian grandmother, whose dead husband, a horse-riding drunk who terrorized and was never seen to cry, spouted incomparable oratory. Many of the best stories focus on the invisible fulcrum of passing time, the moment when an individual realizes, in the face of inexorable events, that things will not be the same. Relatedly, the stories perfectly capture the loss, the missingness, as it were, of the beloved. Dear Baby captures a boxer on the way out, fighting against odds for his dead sweetheart. The wonderful The Great Leapfrog Contest, perhaps my favorite, tells of a new neighborhood girl, Rosie Mahoney, the youngest of a big Irish family who moves into a non-Irish neighborhood where she proves her superiority to all the neighborhood boys-even the new, strong, instinctually cool and filmic-but not Rosie-quality-guy who moves in from Texas and refuses to engage in fisticuffs with a female. Many Miles Per Hour tells of young boys ogling a car souped up to go over fifty (!) miles per hour. Many of the stories feature, or have young male characters; because the stories take place in the first half of the 20th century, they contain a wonderful historical quality. Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart details the angst of a teen desired by a married neighbor whose mother and sister realize what's going on before he does, and laugh when she takes a grown lover, never again to play the story's eponymous song which, she had said, was devoted to him.

Honest Wisdom and Wit of Saroyan Shines
Armenian-American inhabitant William Saroyan, whose heday was between 1934-1940 in San Francisco, is a great America writer of human short stories. He is gifted in characterization, in his ability to capture emotions and interpersonal subtleties; he is also overflowing with a sort of honest wisdom from whose cup it is a pleasure, via reading his stories to drink. There are several great stories in this collection; Secrets of Alexandria is about two isolated moviegoers with movie stars and hoping to hook up but thwarted by events; The Brothers and Sisters tells of the disillusionment of a buff young guy in lust with an innocent hooker, who is accompanied to the mysterious site of his jealousy by a religious member of a family of wine merchants; The Living and the Dead hilariously recounts the commentary of an Armenian grandmother, whose dead husband, a horse-riding drunk who terrorized and was never seen to cry, spouted incomparable oratory. Many of the best stories focus on the invisible fulcrum of passing time, the moment when an individual realizes, in the face of inexorable events, that things will not be the same. Relatedly, the stories perfectly capture the loss, the missingness, as it were, of the beloved. Dear Baby captures a boxer on the way out, fighting against odds for his dead sweetheart. The wonderful The Great Leapfrog Contest, perhaps my favorite, tells of a new neighborhood girl, Rosie Mahoney, the youngest of a big Irish family who moves into a non-Irish neighborhood where she proves her superiority to all the neighborhood boys-even the new, strong, instinctually cool and filmic-but not Rosie-quality-guy who moves in from Texas and refuses to engage in fisticuffs with a female. Many Miles Per Hour tells of young boys ogling a car souped up to go over fifty (!) miles per hour. Many of the stories feature, or have young male characters; because the stories take place in the first half of the 20th century, they contain a wonderful historical quality. Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart details the angst of a teen desired by a married neighbor whose mother and sister realize what's going on before he does, and laugh when she takes a grown lover, never again to play the story's eponymous song which, she had said, was devoted to him.

a wonderful Saroyan day-trip
This little book released by New Directions is bright-eyed and youthful, with hardly any of the rancor contained in Saroyan's other tales.Written all before 1940, these short pieces pick you up quickly, drop you in the middle of a bunch of scrappy kids in Fresno/San Fransisco in the depression era, and then take you back home with hardly any jet-lag.

Saroyan goes back in time effortlessly, describing a game of leap-frog (remember that game, where a line of kids crouch on the ground and one kid hops over the whole line and crouches in the front, and then the last kid gets up and hops over the whole line, to infinity...) where a tough boy and a tough girl compete brutally, leaping and crouching, all the way out into the country and to the next town, ending in a bloody brawl.And in "The Messenger", a young boy gets hilariously distracted from his extremely important mission to send a message to the town doctor.Most of the stories are light, funny and non-ironic, but at times the customary Saroyan bile simmers to the top.Like in "The Living and the Dead", where a reluctant young Communist writer, is walking down the road to town, whistling happily, and suddenly "...the whole world, caught in time and space, seemed to me an absurdity, and insanity, and instead of being amused, which would have been philosophical, I was miserable and began to ridicule all the tragic straining of man, living and dead."Like I said, MOST of the stories are light and funny...

What I like most about these is the sense of respect and compassion Saroyan shows his characters, no matter how young, simple or strange they are.He describes their lives like he was there experiencing the same bittersweet mini-tragedies and absurdities simultaneously, right along with them.He uses the vernacular of the day to write the most endearing dialogue ever, bringing these superbly-drawn characters to luminous life.Saroyan's early stories here reflect the same kind of innocent humor and subtlety as the brief output of another American master, Nathaniel West.If you liked "The Day of the Locust" or "Balso Snell", then these little classics will bring you a similarly delightful reading experience.I strongly believe Raymond Carver to be a literary son, or at least nephew, to William Saroyan here in his best form, the short story.

a brief description
this saroyan collection gathers together some of the stories he wrote while living in san francisco. besides the fact that they are beautiful short stories (one of my favorites: "the mother"), they are all set in san francisco. for a sense of place circa 1930s, a great book. also, the herb caen introduction is a nice addition. makes it a piece of SF literature worth holding onto, i think. ... Read more

Product Description
collectible 1968 first edition in mint shape---never read---32 unforgettable stories ... Read more