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Tax-exempt? | Spit Baths With a reporter's eye for the inside story and a historian's grasp of the ironies in our collective past, Greg Downs affectionately observes some of the last survivors of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America. Living off the map and out of sight, folks like Embee, Rudy, Peg, and Branch define themselves by where they are, not by what they eat, drink, or wear. The man who is soon to abandon his family in "Ain't I a King, Too?" is mistaken for the populist autocrat of Louisiana, Huey P. Long-on the day after Long's assassination. In "Hope Chests," a history teacher marries his student and takes her away from a place she hated, only to find that neither one of them can fully leave it behind. An elderly man in "Snack Cakes" enlists his grandson to help distribute his belongings among his many ex-wives, living and dead. In the title story, another intergenerational family tale, a young boy is caught in a feud between his mother and grandmother. The older woman uses the language of baseball to convey her view of religion and nobility to her grandson before the boy's mother takes him away, maybe forever. Caught up in pasts both personal and epic, Downs's characters struggle to maintain their peculiar, grounded manners in an increasingly detached world. Greg Downs has been the least successful high school varsity basketball coach in Tennessee, the editor of a muckraking weekly newspaper on Chicago's South Side, a karaoke performer profiled in the Boston Phoenix, and a reporter on the tail of a fugitive cult leader. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is an assistant professor of history at the City College of New York. Downs's stories have appeared in such publications as Glimmer Train, Meridian, Chicago Reader, and Sycamore Review. October 2006 ISBN 0820328464 cloth • $24.95 192 pp. • 5 1/4 x 8 in.A volume in the seriesThe Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction "The American short story is in fine hands with Greg Downs and Spit Baths. The stories are often funny, always deft. Here, the conundrums of American life and family are put in bold relief. Readers are in for a treat." —Fenton Johnson, author of Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey"Rich and mesmerizing collection of short fiction." —The Philadelphia Inquirer"[Spit Baths] demonstrates nicely the strange beauty of Downs's imagination ... [Downs] is a writer to watch. His work has a cerebral, surreal element."-Kirkus Reviews "A strong sense of style and unfaltering command of his material allow Downs to take the kinds of risks in tone and subject that make his debut a love-it-or-hate-it proposition."-Publishers Weekly "Downs writes with a Southern twang ... themes and symbols tend to recur: state lines spell betrayal, kids are in the care of grandparents. But there's immense heart to Downs's quirky but controlled storytelling."-Philadelphia Magazine"In his tales of historical intrusion, Downs also speaks elegantly of those ugly histories, namely of racism and hatred, that we'd rather forget, and paints a hopeful portrait of the role family can play in healing those wounds ... Downs is gifted at presenting the tension that accompanies familial love-be it the bafflement those tied by blood feel at the depth of their attachment, or the anxiety those bound by choice feel when realizing affection alone may not hold them together. His historical scope serves to enliven, not obscure, this uncertainty."-San Francisco Chronicle "A childhood split among central Kentucky, Nashville, and Hawaii gave Downs a rare sense of how location and history shape people. His characters devour biographies, attend politicians' funerals, chaperone field trips, latch onto outmoded street names, unearth secrets about dead presidents and watch chain stores gobble up small towns."-Philadelphia Weekly "Spit Baths is one of the most entertaining books of short stories in a long time . This book reads more like a collection of folk songs than of short stories. By toying with history, Downs might be getting closer to the truth than all the history books you had to read in high school . It is a book you won't regret reading."-Lexington Herald-Leader "[Downs's] prose is evocative and finely tuned to his gritty material, and his narratives illuminate his characters and their concerns while acknowledging that the social forces that inform both are impossible to explicate, not because they are too far outside the reader's experience but, rather, because they are too close."-The Virginia Quarterly Review |
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