Ten recommended Andrew Ferguson essays on R. A. Lafferty, with a 107-entry index, links to related criticism, and comparisons with Arrive at Easterwine.

A second example would be "What's the Name of that Town?", in which Epikt (note the wonderful Hellenism: Epiktistes means "The Equitable One," a great name for a calculating device that takes all elements (Stoichae) equally) sorts his facts to discover that something must be missing. — Don Webb, “Effective Arcanum” Polemical post. Don Webb gives a lot of power to the unconscious meaning of words. Amusing, given how unselfconsciously wrong that bullshit about Epiktistes is. We

Hiroshi Inoue recently completed a Japanese translation of More Than Melchisedech (unpublished) and published this truly excellent commentary in a Japanese fanzine. The English translation below restores Lafferty’s original wording wherever Inoue quotes the novel. I agree with most of his argument, including his account of how the novels relate to the short stories. He lays it out with exceptional clarity.

Bix Beiderbecke, one of Smith's great interests I began to write late in life when I realized suddenly one day that I was leaving nothing at all in the world. All old bachelors come to this feeling sooner or later. Don't let it ever happen to you . . . — Lafferty, letter to Sheryl Smith, October 1, 1971 This will be of interest to about three people. Sheryl Smith, Lafferty’s first strong critic and his clever correspondent, ran a computer consulting business in the years befo

I wish to argue here that the recurring pattern of descent and ascent, expressed mythically as katabasis and anabasis, and metaphysically in Neoplatonism as proodos and epistrophe, is not only a formal analogy to Christian theology. Rather, it is decisively reconfigured and fulfilled in the doctrines of kenosis and theosis. In Christianity, this pattern ceases to be merely narrative or purely metaphysical. It becomes Christological and participatory, thereby deepening and ful

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted. — “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician” J.G. BALLARD A beach without an ocean yet, A cartless h

A late-night thought. The readers I think of most often when working on Lafferty are Andrew Ferguson, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, and Gregorio Montejo. Ferguson’s archival work is essential. His chief readerly contribution, so far, is to ask how fiction makes worlds. I think his main philosophical argument cuts off Lafferty from Catholic ontology. A subsidiary question, important to SF scholars and fans, concerns genre history; that is often where Ferguson’s readings come to r

Advanced Lafferty. What comes next won’t depend on it. Not much has been written about Aurelia, but of the handful of things said about it, by far the most interesting and intellectually strongest is Gregorio Montejo’s essay “Eudaimonism in R. A. Lafferty’s Aurelia,” which appeared in Feast of Laughter in 2015. Anyone who wants to read Aurelia seriously should understand its argument. As a teacher of mine used to say, firstest with the mostist criticism. I think Montejo’s arg

"How about Plutarch’s Lives for the one book. No, it isn’t affectation to reach that far back. It is my belief that Plutarch invented the Novel as well as the biography in this. There were fifty short or medium-length novels here (the degree of fiction in them can’t be determined now) and they are good. He invented narration as distinguished from rhetoric and a few other things. He was the world’s best novelist (Balzac comes in second) and nineteen hundred years haven’t done

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quick

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 "Certainly we have heard of Trenton. Every reader of esoterica will have heard of it and the murky quotation 'But thou, Trenton Ephratah, though you be small out of the Cities of New Jersey, out of you shall come an impetus and an infection that will

Here’s a quick sketch of the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How much either of them knew the German

Short post. Quickly sketched thoughts. Bernard Clairvaux has posted an essay on Fourth Mansions. Vastly stronger than his first one. The current essay uses the Alumbrados as a typology. I’m unconvinced that this is the strongest account of the Harvesters, though the direction it points toward is sound. Part of the reluctance is that the Pythons need to be integrated into the Fourth Mansion. The essay acknowledges other spiritual powers, but I don’t see how its governing contr

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: Antisemitism: Tulsa subject catalogue Knight correspondence, January–May 1990: box 7, folder 5 The photographs of Lafferty’s January 24, 1990 letter to Dan Knight in the Antisemitism section came from a source outside the University of Tulsa. Tulsa holds Lafferty’s carbon in the Knight correspondence, box 7, folder 5. Use the folder recor

“In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order n (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident n + 1 involving threads A and C; an incident n + 2 involving threads A and D; an incident n + 3 involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least n + 4 or n +

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy. — R. A. Lafferty, Past Master Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (2025) has me thinking again about Daniel Otto Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous, developed in his 2020 dissertation. La

This post charts Melchisedech Duffey’s sexual conduct and its connection with antisemitic tropes in More Than Melchisedech. The tables collect the evidence for that reading, distinguishing events from characters’ claims and from the novel’s conflicting accounts of identity and time. Duffey is blackmailed with photographs of his sexual misconduct with children and his encounters with adult women. He attributes the photographs of the children to Hugo Stone, whom he identifies w

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny This will be the last I have to say about Lafferty’s Holocaust denial for a while, unless it becomes directly relevant to an argument about a specific story. A counterargument to my account of Lafferty’s beliefs must confront the archival record at the University of Tulsa and explain what it establishes about his history of denial. Lafferty’s January 24, 1990 letter pres

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He’s telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don’t

Sheryl Smith did not write much about Lafferty, but everything she wrote is worth looking at closely. Here is her most groundbreaking essay on him, along with diagrams illustrating how she views myth in his fiction.