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
Spit Baths [EPUB ebook]
Stories
Spit Baths [EPUB ebook]
Stories
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Language English ● Format EPUB ● Pages 192 ● ISBN 9780820342931 ● File size 1.9 MB ● Publisher University of Georgia Press ● City Athens ● Country US ● Published 2011 ● Downloadable 24 months ● Currency EUR ● ID 5513572 ● Copy protection Adobe DRM
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