(XI.3) Throughout the book, Lafferty draws our attention to Sweeny’s sanity and his effect on the sanity No surprise that this story, with its Vogelsprachenkunde theme, would have appealed to Lafferty. Lafferty probably knew the story through Flann O’Brien or through works that drew on J. G. Against this background, consider Lafferty’s description of the bird-like Sweeny: The face was skinny Lafferty’s opening section puzzles over whether Enniscorthy might be a saint.

Lafferty’s ontological distinction between characters and persons is underappreciated in part because This is an important area in which Lafferty is decidedly not of the New Wave. For lack of a better word, Lafferty readers have been stuck calling this the tall tale because Lafferty's Lafferty gets his extreme didacticism from this tradition, whose characters are, more often than not, Those are the questions Lafferty was intensely interested in while being intensely interested in technology

These words from The Superstition of Divorce (1920) shed light on an interpretive crux in Lafferty’s Lafferty explicitly frames her as a holy woman, not a tragic figure. Lafferty’s story leaves no room for ambiguity. The problem is that this would not be the kind of social critique Lafferty was making. Lafferty resolves a dire situation with an improbable solution.

Both stories include contributions from Kimmel and Lafferty. In each, Lafferty wrote the second chapter, following an opening by Cherryh and Kimmel in Haunter of In the fragmentary Traitors of Tarshish, Lafferty took the lead and wrote the first chapter. The Warden is very much a Lafferty creation. In The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra, Lafferty doubles down on the spy spoofery.

Challenging Lafferty today. About Lafferty, a man who made models. That is Lafferty’s logic. And in Lafferty’s vision, it is sacred. , and that Christ’s universality does not erase concrete histories but gathers them into an ordered whole It is quintessential Lafferty.

In “I Don’t Like You,” Lafferty gives the reader a Dr. Lafferty’s character Joe Spade seems pretty close to Lafferty himself when he talks about a "head-grifter At the same time, Lafferty is not completely hostile to psychology. Someone online said years ago that dissociation in Lafferty is a result of Lafferty’s own alcoholism. That was quickly shot down by a Lafferty apologist, who was right that it was too monocausal.

.” — Serpent's Egg What would the perfect Lafferty atlas look like? Then Lafferty gives an afternote as the ending. “The End of Outward” is pretty deep-end Lafferty. wrote: “Admit for a moment, as a hypothesis, that the Creator had before his mind a projection of the whole Lafferty makes human culture the sliding ruler on the cosmic dial.

Lafferty story I will somehow be wrong,” he writes, “because he puts so much into one. These new spur-bones change the whole deportment of the victim; this is the reason that they must be Two ideas from Thinking With Lafferty help open this up further. But Lafferty does not leave the moment in a purely spiritual register. In this way, Lafferty draws on biblical typology, the pattern of type and antitype.

Gosse’s widest-reaching legacy is no doubt his coinage of the word aquarium, which kicked off the whole The notion of prochronic time is something Lafferty returns to fairly often. Lafferty disagreed. But why? This story helps answer that question. I would not argue that Lafferty has Origen on his mind here, but one can see that, when Lafferty thinks Lafferty’s trick is to depict the 67th precinct meeting as a static, bloodless tableau.

As sometimes comes up on the blog, Lafferty loved baseball, and it shows. In the Lafferty archives, there is a fragment called "Fungo Wood and Crackerjacks," a story that pretty Perhaps that oddity helped inspire the story: as with his “All-Star Series,” Lafferty certainly wanted First, it always depended on the word of a man named Abner Graves (read the Gould for the whole story Lafferty tells of a group of child soldiers from the Young Soldier Hills who take a much-needed break

“End of the Line” is not one Lafferty liked. The story has typical Lafferty elements. There are teenagers and detectives. That rings true as core Lafferty. The boys copied random occult symbols from a book called Witchcraft Through the Ages to make the whole Again, core Lafferty. “End of the Line” is preposterous.

Lafferty's answer was—you guessed it—The Elliptical Grave. Here, Lafferty learns to juggle in a new way. It's Lafferty's Lost Race novel. It is his H. Lafferty gives us a lot of that. Lafferty starts with language.