Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Spit Baths: Stories

Spit Baths: Stories

Downs, Greg

Paperback

Series: Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Book 106

General Fiction

Publisher Price: $23.95

ISBN10: 0820342181
ISBN13: 9780820342184
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: Apr 1 2012
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.54 Width: 5.04 Depth: 7.80
Language: English

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.

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