Sam Downs is a fiction writer, essayist, and book reviewer from Minnesota’s Driftless Area, living now in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, the Ploughshares Blog, and Porter House Review, where he serves as Fiction Editor. He can be found @writeitdowns, his incipient Twitter.
Content by Sam Downs
Reviews,
Talking to the Past in Percival Everett’s The Trees
Following last year’s critically acclaimed Telephone, Percival Everett’s The Trees weaves tropes of pulp-cop noir with trademark acuity and genre-bending inventiveness to deliver a swift, startlingly expansive take on the legacy of lynching in the American South.
Interviews,
Playing at the Edge of Expectation: Mackenzie McGee on Entertainment, Absurdity, and Enjoying a Punch in the Gut
Mackenzie McGee has a habit of referring to her work in the first-person plural. Or so I gather when we meet to discuss McGee’s first “real” short story, to use her words: “Re: Frankie,” an epistolary fever dream of dystopian horror and e-harassment first published here in Porter House Review.