From a reproduction of the wonderful Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. 1300 AD). The inscription on Sardinia: Sardinia Grece Sandaliotes dicta a...

A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter  in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta  on pornography in an...

While thinking about Past Master  (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers...

Rock Candy Patent Drawing, 1881 There are quite a few reasons for thinking about Lafferty not as a science fiction writer but as a writer...

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...

Wallpaper Design by William Morris (1834-1896) “So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring...

"And they threw her down, and the wall was sprinkled with her blood, and the horses trod upon her." 2 Kings 9:33 "But one of the...

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “It is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to...

Completed in September 1977 and first published in 1995, "Happening in Chosky Bottoms" is an intriguing Lafferty story .  On one hand, we...

Lafferty completed "Horns on Their Heads" in June 1971, though even that date feels late. The writing belongs to the late 1960s, when he...

Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon  (c. 1470) Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk...

"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of...

Skulls from Hallstatt "The skulls made an impressive show in their niches on the rude wall." “It is only that definitions have lost their...

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571 – 1610, The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. "The light from the sky turned ordinary light black, and...

In the rough diamond between them was a country so harsh as to make even the feral strips look tame. This was deeply muscled country that...

"It was probably in 1309, in anticipation of the emperor’s coming to Italy, that Dante wrote his famous work on the monarchy, De...

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...

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...