ISBN: 9781732982031
Binding: Trade paper
Pages: 272 pages
Publication date: May 18, 2021
 
Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident in 2014, One Kind Favor explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina.  After the lynching of Lincoln Lennox is discovered and subsequently covered up in the small fictional community of Cord, North Carolina, the ghosts who frequent the all-in-one bar and consignment  shop take on the responsibility  of unearthing the truth and acting as the memory for the town that longs to forget and continues to hate. A reimagined Kathy Acker, the groundbreaking literary icon, engages Lincoln in a love triangle and brings a transgressive post-punk esthetic to the mission. The down-the-rabbit-hole satirical storytelling of One Kind Favor, Kevin McIlvoy’s sixth novel, echoes Appalachian ghost stories in which haunting presences will, at last, have their way.
 
Advanced Praise for One Kind Favor
“In One Kind Favor , Kevin McIlvoy crafts a novel we haven’t seen before: a rare book about race and place that offers a nuanced take on the world we live in. The concerns are universal, including what it means to witness trauma in our increasingly divided world. The music is uncompromising — you are drawn into the strikingly beautiful, taut, and relentless prose. The novel’s s hugeness of heart and fierceness will keep you reading. This book feels vital for our times.”
—Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, Winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“Cord, the spirit-haunted North Carolinan town of One Kind Favor, is down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, somewhere over the rainbow after the cyclone-lifted house touches down in that other land. It is uncomfortably situated in our ‘tikilit bloody present.’ I describe Cord as ‘spirit-haunted,’ but is any place in America not haunted by ancestral misdeeds? Squint into the mirror McIlvoy provides, but don’t dare look at the grotesqueries and pretend you’re looking into a funhouse mirror. This is what we really look like.”
—Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You

“Kevin McIlvoy bravely sets forth a suspenseful story that tackles racial violence, police indifference, and the cost of justice in contemporary American South. This is an important novel I look forward to impacting readers far and wide.”
—Devi Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, Winner of the Asian Pacific American Award in Literature

“The shapeshifting beast that is racism haunts small town North Carolina as the living and the dead collide with the past and the present in this novel of boundless surprise, wit, and wisdom."
—T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Welcome to Braggsville
 
“Kevin McIlvoy is a writer of incisive moral vision, and One Kind Favor looks at the brutality of racial injustice in a North Carolina town with a powerful sense of place and clarity and insight."
—Karen E. Bender, author of Refund, Finalist for the National Book Award
 
About the author
KEVIN McILVOY is the author of seven previous books: five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of prose poetry. A retired Regents Professor of Creative Writing from New Mexico State University, he teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. He has been a manuscript consultant for University of Nevada Press, University of Arizona Press, University of New Mexico Press, Indiana State University Press, University of Missouri Press, Orison Books, and other publishers. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.