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.

—Christopher Tilghman, author of Roads of the Heart

Always engaging, at times compelling, Spit Baths is both thoroughly original and completely authentic. Greg Downs unifies these disparate stories through their tone—deadpan, informed with preternatural wisdom, so real they verge into surreal. Working from events stranger than fiction, he explores the hard truths at the edges of our lives, especially regarding the lingering scars of racism. In the process, he draws back a curtain to reveal a world in which people are always searching, never finding someone or some place they can call home.

—Fenton Johnson, author of Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey

Rich and mesmerizing collection of short fiction.

—Philadelphia Inquirer

[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.

—Virginia Quarterly Review

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

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

[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

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