“The answer to the Mystery of Matter (why should there even be so cumbersome a thing as matter? Why did the Word have to be made Flesh? Was not the Making of Matter rather a cheap, and also difficult, trick for a Spirit to indulge in?) — the answer to this contains the answer to the question ‘How Did God Get to be God?’” — “In the Turpentine Trees” (1983) "Snuffles" on my mind. It was a good excuse to reread the edited transcript of the LaffCon3 panel on the story. It was a

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

Who was Arpad Arutinov? We may never know, but he left us with a puzzlingly heterodox work, The Back Door of History , the definitive...

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious...

There were two hundred and forty men in our battery. Not all of them could tell such stories as these that were deep folklore incarnate....

"The principal difference is that Lafferty plays them for laughs and sheer absurdity—his mode is the tall tale. If Paul Bunyan had not...

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the...

Today, something brief on doggerel, memory, and “What’s the Name of That Town?”—one of Lafferty’s best Institute stories. It’s a farce,...

Martin Crookall has done fun blogging on Lafferty. He is one of the few Lafferty readers who writes about the novels, which makes him a...

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I...

I thought it would be fun to build a program that generates visual maps for R. A. Lafferty’s fiction and nonfiction. After a fair bit of...

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Mimesis 1 is the pre-narrative, lived understanding of human action, encompassing...

" . . . just as Atrox devised one hundred and one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality." In an...

The Smiling Christ of St Francis Xavier Gregorio Montejo's essay, "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door: R. A. Lafferty's Bricolage...

Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour...

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty...

I’ve been closely reading "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies." In the coming days, I’ll make several posts about it and post my...

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

"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...

Lafferty’s short sentences fascinate me. For several weeks, I've tried to understand how they work, especially those sentences that carry...