One Kind Favor: A Novel

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.

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.”

“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

Rion Amilcar Scott, author ofThe World Doesn’t Require You

“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.”

Devi Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, Winner of the Asian Pacific American Award in Literature

“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.”

T. Geronimo Johnson, authorof Welcome to Braggsville

“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."

Karen E. Bender, author of Refund, Finalist for the National Book Award

“Kevin McIlvoy is a writer of incisive moral vision, andOne Kind Favorlooks at the brutality of racial injustice in a North Carolina town with a powerful sense of place and clarity and insight."

Book Description

Kevin McIlvoy says ONE KIND FAVOR, his eighth published book, is the most important work of his life.

About the Author

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.

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