One Kind Favor - Paperback

by Kevin McIlvoy (Author)

A haunting tale of racial injustice and small-town secrets in the heart of North Carolina.

In the fictional community of Cord, the lynching of Lincoln Lennox is covered up, leaving the town's ghosts to unearth the truth. Kathy Acker, reimagined as a transgressive literary icon, engages Lincoln in a love triangle, bringing a post-punk aesthetic to the mission. As the all-in-one bar and consignment shop becomes a battleground for memory and hate, the ghosts act as the town's conscience, challenging its desire to forget.

One Kind Favor echoes Appalachian ghost stories, exploring themes of racial violence, social injustice, and the enduring power of the past. Will the haunting presences finally have their way, or will Cord remain trapped in its cycle of denial and hate? Perfect for readers seeking satirical fiction, Southern gothic, and social commentary.

Author Biography

Kevin McIlvoy published six novels, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press), and One Kind Favor (WTAW Press); a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press); and two collections of prose poems and short-short fictions, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books) and Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels (WTAW Press). Singing Lessons (Press 53) is a posthumous collection of his poems. His short fiction has appeared in Harper' s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. His short-short stories, poems and prose poems have appeared in Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Willow Springs, Waxwing, and numerous other literary magazines. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He served as a fiction faculty member at national conferences, including the Ropewalk Writing Conference (Indiana), the Rising Stars Writing Conference (Arizona State University), the Writers at Work Conference (Utah), and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference (Vermont). He was 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, and other publishers. From 2017-2020 he served as a fiction editor for Orison Books. He served on the Board of Directors of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.