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In an interview, Michael Swanwick says something really interesting about Lafferty's novels. First, Lafferty is so singularly different from others in how he plays with layers of allegory that it Lafferty is uses to say something about what it means to be a person: you and I will only understand In Lafferty, the phenomenon is inherently anagogic: it moves us, step by step, toward final things. Lafferty is hyper-aware of how character-driven narratives relativize worlds to the protagonists.

Folksy, hilarious, weird, and drawn out to absurd lengths, it’s one of the strangest episodes in Lafferty The whole thing starts when the redneck liar Corbey, a "crafty old swindler," comes up with a bit of Here is Lafferty on Ribaul: But finally he submitted. He didn't have a tail either. The image of the tail popping out like a cork stayed with Lafferty. In 1977, Lafferty wrote a poem for OKCon titled "Werewolf's Rite of Passage," which reused the folklore

Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even writes that “the year is uncertain.” Lafferty’s birthday, and it falls on a Friday in three plausible postwar years: 1947, 1952, and 1958. Of course, November 7 shows up across Lafferty’s work, and he dated his retirement as a writer from his Lafferty’s birthday fell on a Monday that year. What got me thinking about this is an odd note in Lafferty’s papers.

There are elements of sourness in Lafferty that surface in his thinking about eschatology, and I haven One could say that all the men and women whom Lafferty believed died with grace, or were harrowed from At the same time, the sourness is part of the Lafferty imagination, and it plays a significant role in It is one of Lafferty’s melancholy stories. His usual posture is the zoon anthrōpikon . Instead, Lafferty calls it a sort of psychobiological urge.

Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of The divide, as I see it, is this: Dick makes Gnosticism post-Cartesian; Lafferty keeps it pre-Cartesian Lafferty, by contrast, writes as if the cogito isn’t the center of the universe. Dick worries about the prison of the self; Lafferty worries about the prison of consensus reality.

Lafferty ended up feeling fairly disaffected with American Catholicism. " Ishmael Into the Barrens "— Before the meeting, Lafferty makes clear that this is only one piece of a larger phenomenon. Lafferty seems to have admired Newman and did not associate him with Vatican II. Lafferty’s story dramatizes how messy and often uncomfortable this union can be. The St. And a roadmap for how to misread Lafferty—if you truly wanted to do it well:

Lafferty said he read several hundred science fiction novel s when he majored in science fiction. It is hard to imagine that Sturgeon's novel was not on the Lafferty reading list, given how celebrated Sturgeon has Lone, “the Fabulous Idiot,” and Lafferty has Freddy Foley. In Sturgeon, the simpleton leads humanity forward to a benevolent collective mind; in Lafferty, Freddy Where Sturgeon treats collective consciousness as natural and secularly redemptive, Lafferty presents

Lafferty wrote “The Weirdest World” in 1958. The idea is to take it seriously because we take Lafferty seriously, and want the hard Lafferty to be Lafferty will get very good at it. For all that it is a minor Lafferty classic, it reminds me that the Lafferty most people know and most love is not quite my Lafferty.

Lafferty’s knack for weird and wonderful words is a big part of the joy of reading him. I’ve compiled a full list of Lafferty’s hapaxes from his short fiction, which you’ll find attached. It would be great to have something like Dan Temianka’s Jack Vance Lexicon  for Lafferty (link) . Like Vance, Lafferty didn’t just use words—he played with them, reshaped them, pulled them from the depths Vance's polysyllables fit seamlessly into his mandarin eloquence, while Lafferty, somehow, made them

Lafferty. That is how it works in orthodox Thomism, but Lafferty is Lafferty, and there are complications. Dalton is one of Lafferty’s devilish figures. In some of Lafferty's best black comedies, Grimoire opens Dalton's veins to ensure his death while viewing Lafferty story.

Lafferty plays it a little too straight. As in “Three Men in the Morning, ” Past Master , and a handful of other Lafferty stories, we get the Lafferty’s materialist con game in "Get Off the World" goes in the other direction. It is also a good example of a Lafferty signature: he combines extreme violence and gore with images It should be in a complete edition of Lafferty.

Earlier today, I shared some thoughts on how Jung’s Aion  influenced Lafferty’s Past Master . Lafferty shares with Jung a sense of the spiritual world as oceanic and patterned. Lafferty draws on Erasmus’s portrait and turns physical detail into symbol and satire. Lafferty, then in his early twenties, admired several of the contributors. Knox reads it satirically, as does Lafferty. “It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke.