I answer that, It must be said that every evil in some way has a cause. For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due to a thing. But that anything fail from its natural and due disposition can come only from some cause drawing it out of its proper disposition. For a heavy thing is not moved upwards except by some impelling force; nor does an agent fail in its action except from some impediment. But only good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause exce

Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous N

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdo