"It was probably in 1309, in anticipation of the emperor’s coming to Italy, that Dante wrote his famous work on the monarchy, De Monarchia , in three books. Fearing lest he “should one day be convicted of the charge of the buried talent” and desirous of “keeping vigil for the good of the world,” he proceeds successively to show that a single supreme temporal monarchy—the empire—is necessary for the well-being of the world, that the Roman people acquired universal sovereign sw

I recently saw someone online say, “There is always a snake in a Lafferty book,” and that is pretty much right. I like the snakes in...

I admire Lafferty’s verse. It's often the reactor core of his imagination, where he puts so much pressure on the carbon of his...

One of my favorite directors is John Ford, and like many Ford fans, I have a special place in my heart for The Man Who Shot Liberty...

Lafferty’s knack for weird and wonderful words is a big part of the joy of reading him. His stories don’t just tell—they sing, hum,...

The Execution of Thomas More in 1535 by Antoine Caron (1521-1599) I’m working through Past Master to create an annotated outline, and a...

I love to sail the ocean quaint, I love the waves that rush-o. I love to paint with sightless paint, I love to whack my brush-o. "Ballad...

First, a table that lays out the plot of Space Chantey (1968), then some thoughts about Lafferty's Lay . When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded With long-eared rout, to battle sounded, And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Was beat with fist, instead of a stick; Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling, And out he rode a-colonelling. That's Hudibras , Samuel Butler’s scathing seventeenth-century takedown of Cromwell's England. But they sound a lot like Lafferty. T

“It was like an old Puca comedy: one person falls into the quicksand, drags another in after him, then a third, then a fourth—until they...

I was lucky enough to come across Andrew Ferguson’s thoughts on Lafferty’s ghost story early on—Lafferty's idea that his fiction forms a single, ongoing work of art, with an underlay that occasionally flickers into view. It’s a fascinating idea, but hard to pin down. If you’ve read enough Lafferty, you recognize it when it happens. I wanted a more concrete way to conceptualize and track this ghostly presence, so I experimented with different philosophical and literary framewo

Lafferty's published fiction comprises roughly 2,836,500 words and features around 80,000 unique word forms. What stands out is the...

Holy Allegory by Giovanni Bellini, Uffizi Galleries Lafferty’s use of allegory is complicated. One of the most effective critical tools for approaching it is Northrop Frye’s idea that allegory is a sliding scale, a view that profoundly influenced Angus Fletcher’s seminal Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) and Fredric Jameson's ideas about allegory in science fiction. In the "Second Essay" of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye writes, "Within the boundaries of lit

"R.A. Lafferty's Escape from Flatland; or, How to Build a World in Three Easy Steps" (Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, November 2014, pp. 543-561). Andrew Ferguson's take on Lafferty is both brilliant and ingenious. Having read more Lafferty than anyone else, he brings an unparalleled knowledge of the Lafferty archive and a depth of understanding that will be especially inspiring to writers and other artists who turn to Lafferty for creative fuel. His insights have be

Lafferty’s Dotty offers a glimpse into what his literary career might have been had he pursued fiction outside of genre marketing...

The more I think about Past Master , the clearer I see how Lafferty is playing with groups of three. Today I spent some time tracing out...

As a kid who couldn’t get enough sword and sorcery, I read every Offutt paperback I could find. Here’s Lafferty putting him on blast....