No, I can’t recommend any good Irish myths or legends in translation. I have a copy of the John Strachan STORIES FROM THE TAIN which I have been meaning to translate for some years now, but it’s too damned difficult. It does have a glossary, but that covers only the unusual words. I have to go to my Dineen’s Irish-English dictionary a dozen times a page and it usually will not have the word, it being of modern Irish and the Tain being old Irish. But I have adapted several of

Today, an Argo Atlas, to be combined with a Coscuin Atlas at some point. As I put it together, I thought it would be fun to mention some connections between Finnegan and Dana Coscuin, too. Readers who come to The Devil is Dead without having read the Coscuin Chronicles meet a character named Angela Cosquin in chapter seventeen. She is a Basse-Terre barmaid with an odd last name, and the reader learns that her father drew treasure maps for confidence men. Nothing in the novel

Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous N

My working theory is that the best chronological anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” Yet he does something unusual: he gives the day of the week, thereby creating several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. Within the plausible postwar range, November 7

“In any case the Apollonius story is not just a series of ‘and thens’: it drives us on toward a conclusion which restates the theme of the opening. At the beginning Apollonius encounters a king who is living in incest with his daughter, so that his daughter is also his wife: at the end Apollonius himself is a prince united with his lost wife and daughter. The story proceeds toward an end which echoes the beginning, but echoes it in a different world. The beginning is the demo

Finnegan had the barrel of the rifle in his hands. Then he had Saxon Seaworthy in his hands, far underwater in a turmoil. Saxon did not die easily or willingly. To lull the grip he went limp as though already gone. Then, thirty seconds later, he erupted with violent writhing so as to break away. It was not easy to throttle a man with so sinewy a neck that was also protected by the pherea, the throat protuberances of an old satyr: and to choke off the air of a man already unde

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.” — Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire (1974) "Other Side of the Moon” is early Lafferty. It centers on Johnny O’Connor, who lives by routine. Every evening, he takes the same bus with the same passengers. They include the old Joker with the egg-shaped face,

Clone of RAL's Voice