What Did You Do Today?

by Anthony Varallo

Overview

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. “The stories in this book are like hard little perfect gems. Except when there’re like nice firm chewy gummy candies with something extra inside. Or maybe like zingy spritzery shots of something to drink. Or brain zaps. Or like when your doctor taps your knee just right and you don’t know how they did it. Which I guess means just that this excitingly original work rewards a reader intellectually and emotionally and stylistically, and with humor and pity and sadness all at once. It’s a book I will recommend to my smart reader friends.”—Rebecca Brown, judge and author of The Gifts of the Body and You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574419269
Publisher:	University of North Texas Press
Publication date:	12/13/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	595 KB

About the Author

ANTHONY VARALLO is the author of a novel, The Lines, as well as four previous short story collections: This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award; Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Think of Me and I’ll Know; and Everyone Was There, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is a professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Find him online at anthonyvarallo.com.

Editorial Reviews

The stories in this book are like hard little perfect gems. Except when they’re like nice firm chewy gummy candies with something extra inside. Or maybe like zingy, spritzery shots of something to drink. Or brain zaps. Or like when your doctor taps your knee just right and you don’t know how they did it. Which I guess means just that this excitingly original work rewards a reader intellectually and emotionally and stylistically, and with humor and pity and sadness all at once. It’s a book I will recommend to my smart reader friends.”—Rebecca Brown, judge and author of The Gifts of the Body and You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe

“In the hands of Anthony Varallo, What Did You Do Today? turns out to be the most profound question in the language. Because Varallo shows us that whatever you did, it was singular and strange and noteworthy. I’m crazy about these surprising stories.”—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North
 
“There are few authors working in the flash form today who write with as much grace and mastery as Tony Varallo. Filled with humor and warmth, these beautiful and elegantly crafted stories give us powerful glimpses into the complex inner worlds of parents and children struggling with the challenges of growing up and growing old, of being both a caretaker and the one in need of care. These are generous, big-hearted, gorgeously written stories. An important and timeless collection.”—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared
 
“A master of the miniature, Varallo brilliantly reminds us that the speck is the universe, the miniscule is momentous. What Did You Do Today? left me terrified and joyful and so strangely in love with being alive. When we have all disappeared from this earth, may these stories remain as evidence that to be seriously lost means we've been finally found.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk

"Deceptively plain English and deadpan humor are Varallo's modus operandi. In this he rivals James Thurber and E. B. White, classic humorists and New Yorker writers of a century ago."—Rivanna Review

"[Varallo] knows how to strike the right balance between the ordinary and the frankly impossible. Bizarre events occur against a backdrop of everyday domesticity, as parents and children go about their lives. . . . There is nothing overwrought or Lovecraftian here. Many stories are humorous, and Varallo seems bent on reminding the reader of strangeness in this world where so often we are merely pretending to be smart or to have things figured out. The stories constitute a remonstrance, in a way, but a pleasurable one. . . . What Did You Do Today? is wise, entertaining and consistently surprising."—Dactyl Review

From the Publisher