“Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?” “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. Th

Works resource updated. I have turned it into the research tool I wish had existed when I began reading Lafferty. It brings together a large body of information in a searchable catalogue. You can browse Lafferty’s works, publication appearances, completion dates, reviews, variants, translations, links to cover art and full issue scans, and references to archival holdings at the University of Tulsa and the University of Iowa, from which manuscript scans may be ordered. The pro

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader. 1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Garg

For anyone else who enjoys this sort of thing, here are some of Lafferty’s original titles: "Pani People" became "Pani Planet." "Rangle Dang Kaloof" became "Rang Dang Kaloof" on republication “Glaciation” became “Day of the Glacier” "Is He a Wreck?" became “Adam Had Three Brothers” "And There Confuse" became "Special Condition in Summit Street" "Blood Off a Knife" became "Enfants Terribles" "Mater Inventorum" became "Eurema’s Dam" "Saecula Saeculorum" became "Been a Long Long

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty, so what follows is inevitably a bit disjointed. If it has a center, it is in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life. People like to say Lafferty wrote tall tales, but in a real sense, he wrote prose poems. Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (I’ll include a list of his translation

Lafferty drew on ideas from Gnosticism for many of his most important short stories, from "Snuffles" to "The All At-Once Man" to "In the Turpenine Trees." Gaps in historians' knowledge of Gnosticism became grist for his metaphysical imagination throughout his writing career. I’d like to have a post on this blog where I can keep updating my understanding of this side of Lafferty’s work. That’s the purpose of this space. It will include a timeline of how the West has understood

Lafferty’s In a Green Tree contains the titles of many works and makes allusions to others. Here is a partial Green Tree reading list: Adams, Henry: The Education of Henry Adams Appleton, Victor: Tom Swift books Arlen, Michael: The Green Hat Belloc, Hilaire: Multiple works including History of England and The Servile State Benet, Stephen Vincent: "The King of the Cats" Bennet, Arnold: Mentioned as an author in The Week-End Library Biggers, Earl Derr: Seven Keys to Baldpate Br

Prompted by a question Chris Merrick asked on East of Laughter, I’ve been cataloguing the changes made when moving Lafferty's short stories from their original publications into his collected editions. Unsurprisingly, there are small cuts, a large number of accidentals, and surprising additions and clarifications. I’ll keep high-level summaries of these changes in this post as I track them, one collection at a time. Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970): Reprints. House style cha

My Messy Living Room A friend of the blog asked which books have shaped me. It’s not an easy question. The first time I read with real focus was at the age of fifteen. For Christmas, I’d asked for everything James Joyce wrote, along with some critical studies, including the well-known Ellmann biography (now the subject of a biography itself), which our family dog chewed to pulp, leaving the last hundred pages soaked in slobber. That year, I read mostly Joyce, books about Joyc

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, crackle, and bang with the pleasure of language. Some of that magic lies in the odd, rare, and sometimes completely made-up words he slips in, all part of his linguistic mischief. One of my favorites? Gynotikolobomassophile—his coinage for someone who loves women with fat ankles. For anyone tracking down these linguistic curiosities, a good place

“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 all vanish to their deaths. Who could help laughing at a thing like that, especially when the actors were not Puca themselves but had been given parts in a play that was real?” The Reefs of Earth (1968) Reading large chunks of Lafferty is anything but straightforward. It’s not just that his thinking is wildly inventive, sharp, and lateral—i