Little Will with a rubber band Shot his sister out of hand Shot her with a joyful shout In the eye and put it out. Two stories that seem to belong together. One mostly unknown. The other mostly forgotten. Each is about a practical joker who gets his just deserts. “Live It Again” and “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” are weak Lafferty stories, though that is unfair to say of the unpublished “Live It Again,” which should be held to a different standard. “Of Laughter and the

“It is not my game. I am too guileless.” “The serpent in the garden said the same, but for all that he had a motive.” “Hands of the Man” was written in 1957 as a con-game story with no science fiction elements, and interesting for at least three reasons. The first two have been documented by Andrew Ferguson . First, it is a Wreckville story, so anyone interested in Lafferty’s heterotopia of brilliant confidence agents will want to know it. Aside from the early novel Antonino

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.” “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather su