"The last work of fiction from acclaimed author Kevin McIlvoy, the stories in Is It So? evidence McIlvoy's artistic dedication to the irreal, the carnivalesque, to ghost stories, fairy tales, the short short form, and to prose poems-writing that thrives in margins, borderlands, and edges. A retired dance instructor battles a flock of diabolically vengeful crows for control of his garden. For fifty years a teacher maintains an unusual relationship with an eccentric, durable office friend. A paralyzed, cognitively impaired stroke survivor and her brother-in-law are "attentive to each other's self-talk" that centers on cake. A pilgrim in the DMV slowly ascends dusty stairwells to the Office of the Clerk of Happiness. Confident in the power of truths left unspoken, McIlvoy makes us gifts of found stories excavated, clear-eyed, from his original transformative view of the everyday. Is It So? tunnels deep into the recesses of long-life experience and leads us ultimately to light"--