The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories is William Saroyan's debut collection of short fiction, described as ”the most talked-about literary discovery of 1934." Sixteen of them are being published in Bulgarian for the first time.
The Great Depression in San Francisco, a city that housed lost souls from many nations: Armenians, Jews, Chinese, Russians, Polish, Africans, Irish in a time of deep upheaval. Saroyan's characters aspire to be writers, work as telegraph operators or commercial travellers, live through music, collect strange things, meet in night schools, betting shops, cinemas and barbershops, dream, love and suffer, but invariably with humanity, compassion and generosity, for by the author's own admission “If I aim at anything at all, it is to show the brotherhood between people”.
Saroyan often writes in the first person, uses punctuation unconventionally, his style is modern, open, breathless and welcoming, and the amalgam of transcendent poetry reminiscent of Whitman and eccentric characters in the vein of Steinbeck and Salinger creates a unique prose that still touches the soul and captivates.
His characters are like blades of grass capable of breaking through concrete.
Stephen Fry
William Saroyan
William Saroyan (1908-1981), novelist and playwright, is one of the world's most widely read and translated writers. Prolific and versatile, he wrote novels, short stories, plays, essays, memoirs, and song lyrics. Kurt Vonnegut called him “the first and still greatest American minimalist.” In 1939, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for playwriting, a distinction he rejected on the grounds that “business should not be the judge of art.” In 1943 he received an Oscar for his screenplay, which he then revised into a novel, The Human Comedy.
