The “sad and sunny” work of the American writer William Saroyan is well known to readers from his famous novels “The Human Comedy”, “The Adventures of Wesley Jackson” and the plays “In the Mountains is My Heart...” and “The Path of Your Life”. However, the writer’s original, sparkling talent was fully revealed in his signature genre - the short story genre. Saroyan began his path in literature precisely as a storyteller and always gave a clear preference to this genre: “Life is inexhaustible, and for a writer the most inexhaustible form is the story.” This publication includes more than forty previously unpublished stories in Russian from the collections “The Brave Young Man on flying trapeze" (1934), "Inhale and exhale" (1936), "48 stories of Saroyan" (1942), "All Holy and the Heavens themselves" (1956) and others. And in all of them, Saroyan tried to implement the program he himself declared in his youth - “to understand and show a person as a brother,” to speak with people and about people in “a universal language - the language of the human heart, which is eternal and the same for everyone in the world,” “ to provide wandering humanity with a well-developed, reliable map showing him the path to himself.”