[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….
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