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 translations

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...

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