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Lafferty never worked it out. And here Lafferty does something remarkable. Getting out of structural binds was part of Lafferty’s genius. Nor was Lafferty going to put God on trial the way James K. So Lafferty moved on to other things.

This kind of tonal whiplash is a staple of Lafferty’s fiction. Not long ago, Andrew Ferguson asked what the funniest Lafferty work is. Most Lafferty fans love how often he makes them laugh. He is a very funny writer. While I think Lafferty is often funnier than other writers, I struggle to name a single purely funny This is Lafferty’s Janusian peripeteia  at its lightest.

“Live It Again” and “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” are weak Lafferty stories, though that is unfair “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” reads as if Lafferty remembered the failed earlier story and really Lafferty having any love for their humor. There is not much here, but it was an idea Lafferty apparently wanted to get right: the practical joker But his cruelest jokes are reserved for Gale, and they make for some of the meanest writing in Lafferty

. — Henry David Thoreau Lafferty seems to have liked the idea of shells being communication devices. In “By the Seashore,” we get Lafferty’s weird invention, the sinister Geography Cone. Lafferty shells usually appear somewhat ugly or dangerous to the smart characters. One thinks of Albert in “Eurema’s Dam,” a slightly earlier version of the character type in Lafferty. He is a young boy considered dull, perhaps retarded (Lafferty’s word), by his family.

It is somehow bound up with adrenarche in Lafferty. Oh, and yes: “Golden Gate” is a brilliant Lafferty story, written in 1958. It looks to me that Lafferty is doing something that is nearly liturgical. Barnaby is a rum-dum, as Lafferty’s narrator says, using a great piece of 1890s slang (Lafferty is always Lafferty says the Golden Gate has nothing to do with San Francisco.

Lafferty’s short story “The Cliff Climbers” seems to have been inspired by El Morro National Monument What is unusual are the meanings Lafferty pressgangs. As Lafferty went deeper into his novel writing, the entire set of problems and ideas that cluster around “The Cliff Climbers” is a minor Lafferty classic. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Lafferty did not take history seriously.

Lafferty finished the original draft of “Once on Aranea” in October 1961 and rewrote it in January 1965 focused on personal horror, in the rewrite it became a piece of cosmic horror and one of my favorite Lafferty In the original version of the story, Lafferty alludes to Gulliver’s Travels  (“He swore at them and muttered something about ‘Gulliver’ come to judgment”), but Lafferty wisely removed this when darkening What Lafferty cut was pretty limp stuff.

Advanced Lafferty today. Lafferty fans who want to think with Lafferty should read it closely. I agree that this kind of figure does appear in Lafferty. Consider eating in Lafferty, an obsessive topic for him. Eating is a major Lafferty theme, a complicated image, and it is a source of ideas for Lafferty.

—one of Lafferty’s best Institute stories. Lafferty’s poetry deserves more attention than it gets. But with Lafferty, that doggerel pressure is part of the design. So let’s take a look at a few of Lafferty’s best. My copy of Lafferty's Laughing Kelly and Other Verses (1983), which includes Lafferty’s Little Willy

It is the best Lafferty resource. Her seminal work American Humor  (1931) is a book anyone interested in Lafferty ought to read. Andrew Ferguson has done exceptionally strong archival work on Lafferty’s “One at a Time.” Lafferty describes him as a “clear coon-dog crazy” stranger. The timing is perfect, and Lafferty delivers it with a master’s touch.

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty , so what People like to say Lafferty wrote tall tales, but in a real sense, he wrote prose poems. Lafferty calls the peer critics vultures. Like Lafferty, Dotty likes the euphony of Kitty’s name, which makes sense. He created it. This sort of back-and-forth continues for a while, but it’s one of the few places where Lafferty directly

He also noted that Virginia Kidd once remarked on this habit in Lafferty’s work. After that, Lafferty seems to have toned it down. I am thankful for Kidd’s comment. It probably pushed Lafferty to become even more creative with the names he gave his characters. In this way, it is very much a Lafferty story, and it has excellent dialogue. The following interrogation shows what kind of game Lafferty is playing.