"Probably since O. Henry," Elizabeth Bowen once remarked, "nobody has done more than William Saroyan to endear and stabilize the short story."

Saroyan, who burst upon the scene in 1934 with his celebrated short-story collection The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, enjoyed a long and prolific literary career. Famous for his novels and plays (including The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life), he also published sixteen acclaimed story collections. "It came as something of a shock then, after the author's death in 1981," the editor Leo Hamalian notes, "to realize that Saroyan hadn't published a collection of his short stories since The Whole Voyald in 1956, a period of twenty-five years that also represents half of his writing life."

Uncollected until now are the masterly late pieces he published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's in the 1960s and '70s. Ranging from the homely and congenially human world of immigrant families to the life of an expatriate writer--with children--abroad, the stories of Madness in the Family give an overpowering sense of the fullness of life. Saroyan's singular voice--equal parts clean and shrewd humor--serves a cup brimful of what rare and happy luck it is to be alive.