How Dotty’s image of God as “that Old Jew” changes from accusation to providence, and why that change matters to the novel’s antisemitism.

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return. — Dotty A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to corr

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 translation

Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick he uses in nearly every piece of his fiction. It works somewhat like metonymy and somewhat like iconicity. Metonymy is a rhetorical figure in which one thing stands in for another with which it is closely associated (as in "the kitchen is working overtime," where "kitchen" represents the staff who work in it). Iconicity, on the other hand,

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 constraints. More significantly, it serves as a tuning fork for reading his later work. Rich in Catholic thought yet presented with sharp ironies, the novel raises questions about its intended readership in my mind. Unlike much of Lafferty’s work, Dotty puts a check on its exaggerated humor and avoids discontinuous allegory, the mode I think Laffer