The last work of fiction from acclaimed author Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels showcases McIlvoy's artistic dedication to the irreal, the carnivalesque, to ghost stories, fairy tales, the short short form-writing that thrives in the edges, margins, and borderlands. A retired dance instructor battles a flock of dive-bombing crows for control of his garden. A teacher and his students develop an uncommon bond with a toy parrot. A seeker in the alternate universe of a DMV is dispatched through numberless corridors to see the Clerk of Happiness. Is It So? tunnels deep into the recesses of long-life experience. With clear-eyed and transformative vision-and confidence in the power of truths left unspoken-Kevin McIlvoy gifts readers "found" stories excavated from the everyday.
Kevin McIlvoy's collection Is It So? straddles ordinary vision and unusual sensations. Recklessly, marvelously, these prose pieces call on us to question reality as they cut a trail through the underbrush of perceptions, giving us glimpses of beauty in sunsets, crows, and phantasms-and an avid discernment of wonder within even the afflicted and the ordinary. -Anita Felicelli, author of Chimerica and Love Songs for a Lost Continent
Here are wildly innovative stories that reward a second, even a third, reading. Some are funny, others heartbreaking, many both. The best are absolutely brilliant. -Richard Russo, author of "Somebody's Fool"
This dazzling final fiction collection from Kevin McIlvoy dips into and out of sparkling worlds of dark wonder. The glyphs, glimpses, and found novels in Is It So?-from friendships with toy parrots and holy dogs to high-stakes conversations about cake and sonic landscapes to wild instructions for final dispositions-stunningly evoke the tragic brightness and the comic darkness of lived experience. This is a book that dances and sings and dies and lives. This is a book by a master devoted to the daring art of making the most pressing mysteries-the ones beneath the words-deeply, truly, fully felt. -Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man and Big Lonesome
This book may be the most personal of Mc's prose works. In the autographical bits-disguised, as is all autobiography in all his works by veiling, distortion, and transposition-he is, as I see it, putting his heart in order. There is reckoning-the jettisoning of romantic notions about self and others, and acknowledgment that too often our self-delusions mean we fail to see what's beneath a clear surface. But there is equally present the hard-won wisdom of an elder taking the long view on life's trials and joys, and the inevitability of death.-Christine Hale, author of A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice and wife of Kevin McIlvoy
