The stories in What Did You Do Today? explore the ordinary and the offbeat as if they were one and the same, asking what it’s like to be alive and what makes us human. With warmth, humor, and wonder, these stories suggest that the past is always alive in the present and that even the most fleeting relationships have the power to change us forever. In these short narratives, nothing is negligible, and all experience is transformative.

When an unwed pregnant woman is pressured to get married by her boyfriend, parents, and the entire culture around her, she sees a feverish intensity emanating from the path to domesticity, a “paved path shaded by thick-trunked trees, lined with trim grass and manicured mansions, where miniature houses play mailboxes and animals play lawn ornaments and people play happiness.” Jessica Hollander’s debut collection exposes a culture that glorifies and disparages traditional domesticity, where people’s confusion, apathy, and anxiety about the institutions of marriage and family often drive them to self-destruction. The world in Hollander’s nineteen stories appears at once familiar and vividly unsettling, with undercurrents of anger and violence attached to everyday objects and spaces: a pink room is “a woman exploded,” home smells “of laundered clothes and gas from the grill,” and the sun “is so bright the sky fills with over-exposure, wilting the corners to orange, to red, to black.” Here people adopt extreme and erratic behavior: hack at furniture, have affairs with high school students, fantasize about sex with “monsters,” laden flower bouquets with messages of hate; but these self-destructive acts and fantasies feel strangely like a form of growth or enlightenment, or at least the only …

Donald Vogel arrived in Dallas at the beginning of World War II after a sojourn at the Art Institute of Chicago. “The feeling of space, its clear clean atmosphere, the calm courtesy of the people and promises of growth all gave hope to a young, would-be painter. What I could not have anticipated was that there would be no gentle growth: it exploded in every direction and the money followed.” Along with the wealth came East Coast art dealers who followed the oil field trails throughout Oklahoma and Texas. They brought dubious art and fake old masters, but the same growth that attracted disreputable dealers also made it possible for Vogel to be part of bringing fine works of art to Dallas, first at the Betty McLean Gallery and later at his own Valley House Gallery. In the words of Dechard Turner, “The Gallery opened the doors to the highest levels of sophistication in art. Not all entered, but the triumph of the Vogel story is that many did!” Already established as a painter, Vogel soon became the outlet in Dallas of art dealers in the United States and Europe. He has been an important part of the Dallas art …