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 often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange new conceptual structures all his own. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as in his short story "Snuffles" (1960), where being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Ca

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...

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

"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...

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...

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...

“It was like an old Puca comedy: one person falls into the quicksand, drags another in after him, then a third, then a fourth—until they...

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...