The metamorphosis of human children into adults is a disguised sort since children look more like adults than caterpillars look like butterflies or tadpoles look like frogs. — Letter The rest of the week was filled with great expectation. Henry dreamed it out in the mornings as he sat in the cave, and in the afternoons as he sat on top of Doolen's Mountain. The appeal of a completely untrammeled existence has always been strong. It would be perfect to be no more than a pair o

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 Valance (1962). The film follows two men: Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), an idealistic lawyer, and Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a rugged frontiersman. Stoddard arrives in the town of Shinbone believing in law and order. But he is beaten and humiliated by the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Rescued by Doniphon, Stoddard recovers and begins te

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 single, ongoing work of art, with an underlay that occasionally flickers into view. It’s a fascinating idea, but hard to pin down. If you’ve read enough Lafferty, you recognize it when it happens. I wanted a more concrete way to conceptualize and track this ghostly presence, so I experimented with different philosophical and literary framewo