[Saroyan's] strongest writing, and there is much that is strong indeed, has always been in the short story, and there are many of those wonderful early ones in ["My Name Is Saroyan"]. He was a master of this most difficult of the prose forms and, in particular, could run the reader through changes with the discursive, free-flowing, seemingly inadvertent. Here is the beginning of "The First Day of Summer":

The first day of summer was cold, foggy, damp, dark, and like a day of winter. He had had no idea it was the first day of summer until the neighbor boy, Jimmy Barcos, now thirteen, told him….

And of course the story is about the first day of summer, the boy, the ball, Russia, Edmund Wilson and everything. This story, like many of the others, flows effortlessly and maintains its tone, its point of view, and its concerns...