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Lafferty writes, In the town there are many races living, each in its own enclave . . . Lafferty may be running the old Adam Had Three Brothers con on us as readers. Finally, the story has Lafferty’s first use of the term recension . they blur in hindsight because Lafferty complexifies. The more time you spend with Lafferty, the more baroque you see him to be.

This time, Lafferty gives us a man later identified as Peter Potsworth. “Great Green Goat” is prenucleation Lafferty, and because the story world is so flat, Lafferty’s compensatory That kind of self reflexive move works in Lafferty’s bold story worlds. The allotropic state we associate with a Lafferty story does not appear. The story is Lafferty at his least oceanic.

Most people who speak this way know little of history; Lafferty knew a great deal. Well, it is what Lafferty always hated. Lafferty is clear on this point. That’s what Lafferty is talking about: not genocide, but Gleichschaltung . That, I think, is how Lafferty saw the Germans’ part in it.

Martin Crookall has done fun blogging on Lafferty. He likes to say that Lafferty has about two hundred fans. But Lafferty fans are an odd lot. Such is the experience of reading the lafferties. This is the didactic Lafferty.

Lafferty once did just that. As a child, Lafferty struggled to speak straight. Like Albert, Lafferty had “abominable handwriting” (Lafferty was left handed but the sisters made him Lafferty once said, “I was very awkward and shy, then. Of course, unlike Albert, Lafferty built stories.

"The Roots of Folklore" As a piece of writing, Lafferty’s unpublished “The Roots of Folklore”(it became It is a place where Lafferty both performs tall tales and talks explicitly about what he is performing In “The Roots of Folklore,” Lafferty casts himself as his own unreliable narrator, the sarge from the 200th, one half real Lafferty, one half confection. Lafferty says that the men in the 200th could tell you folklore—real folklore.

Lafferty’s “Mr. Hamadryad” is a difficult story. At least it is for me. Phantasmetaxis is a rhetorical strategy Lafferty often uses to build up the plot. Yes, this is one of Lafferty’s pessimistic animal eschatologies. It could be a lot worse, Lafferty seems to say. Lafferty is in one of his delightfully imaginative bad moods.

How great that Centipede Press has for years been publishing Lafferty in handsome volumes. My heart sank a little: “As an authorial chameleon, Lafferty commands the role with poise, tact, and It’s Lafferty’s clever poke at the so-called experts who can’t dig themselves out of trouble even with This is what happens when people try to sell Lafferty but don’t want him to be anything other than what "O, that Lafferty."

“On the Joys and Trials” is an unpublished speech Lafferty prepared in March 1982 for the Oklahoma Library It is the fullest statement Lafferty ever made about his own practice as a writer. Writers, Lafferty says, are fortunate because they can have that hour wherever they choose. To use a Lafferty image, it is as if poltergeists had animated the hold houses. It is often said that Lafferty does not write like other writers, and that is true.

For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material the "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty To give a sense of the fun things in it, a little of Lafferty’s busted material: [1 — Glass eye passage And, after a while, the intervals become more irregular, and the men begin to break up [?] [?]

“Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent It is a methodological salvo, and it is also just a good, memorable ghost story, with Lafferty working At the end of it, Lafferty steps in to place some fun spin on the outermost diegetic level, which he So Lafferty’s narrator gets the last word on the ghost in the corn crib. This semester I delivered two guest lectures as introductions to Lafferty’s formalism; in the future,

Lafferty does the opposite. He snaps it. In "Six Leagues from Lop," Lafferty creates a modern narrator. Lafferty’s story then jumps seven hundred years into the future. That is why Lafferty uses the word geodic  and not gravity . when Lafferty makes it so plainly worth asking.