The greatest loss of life from a "natural disaster" in the United States occurred on September 9, 1900, when a category 4 hurricane struck the boom town of Galveston, Texas killing at least 8,000 people, destroying about 7,000 buildings and leaving more than 10,000 people homeless. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 which struck the New Orleans area in 2005, killed about 1,800 and displaced about one million people. The city of Galveston as it was, never really re

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 translatio

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