Lafferty loves technological dead ends and byways. Lafferty’s short story one-ups McDermott’s mystery of the lost panoramas. Charley, you can't find a brush stroke in that whole picture! Not in any of the real ones.” One publication even calls it one of Lafferty’s simplest. That is Lafferty's sacramental poesis again. That much is easy.

. — “Tolkien as Christian” Advanced Lafferty. In September of 1989, Lafferty praised what Knight had produced. Here Lafferty is thinking with Teilhard de Chardin again. Lafferty leaves the direction uncertain. Lafferty is pretty clear in distinguishing the two.

Lafferty wrote the final chapter and the afterword. It seems unkind to point out how bad the first two chapters are when the whole thing was written for Lafferty picks up the story here. Lafferty has made the story’s shortcomings part of the story. Then Lafferty makes a good story.

Hamadryad” is a wonderfully weird Lafferty story. It follows a traveling coconut salesman who has three encounters with an eccentric cosmologist whose Easter Island, the two figures discuss fallen races, faith that moves mountains, and, a topic that Lafferty Over the past few months, I’ve made several dramatized audio versions of Lafferty’s stories to listen

He also notes that if Lafferty hadn’t broken into science fiction, this is the kind of genre work he might have written more of—a possibility Lafferty himself mentioned in passing. Ferguson points readers to Lafferty's great unpublished novel Mantis. Lafferty doesn’t so much write mysteries as write from mystery. What he produces are puzzles. Still, picking up on Ferguson's insight, Lafferty wasn’t made for mystery fiction.

Lafferty rejected this outright. In the Lafferty-Smith correspondence, Lafferty mentions the sages that appear in the final story. In this respect, Lafferty’s letter to Smith is useful because it shows that Lafferty conceived of the As with many of Lafferty’s stories, this one is a thought experiment. I doubt Lafferty enjoyed Kierkegaard, but he is on Kierkegaardian ground here.

I see it instead as one of Lafferty’s angriest early portrayals of societal decline, a theme always central It ends with Lafferty coopting the reader’s perspective, one of his fourth-wall breaks, to introduce Much that would later become more interesting in Lafferty is already present in this early short story For much of his early life, Lafferty remained at least nominally a Democrat, as he once joked, out of Lafferty’s shift to a collective “we,” observing Thomas Castlereagh’s “august hands,” gives us a society

a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. What is Lafferty’s aim in this performance? Lafferty has two very important rhetorical strategies. More than most genre writers, Lafferty is architectonic in his figuration. All Lafferty stories have weird shapes. There is no way to avoid the informational density in Lafferty.

You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation Letter I’ve written quite a few times on the blog about Lafferty’s games with Forteanism, and it occurred Knight’s book might explain why Fort began to take on an increasingly important role in Lafferty’s seventies With that said, here is a list of what I consider to be the Fortean canon in Lafferty. “Dig a Crooked Hole” “When All the Lands Pour Out Again” “Bequest of Wings” “The Doggone Highly Scientific

But it shows something instructive about Lafferty’s development. This is an early Lafferty story that does not set up its allegorical trapdoor the way Lafferty usually When Lafferty writes that the Analoi have kept the venom of sin while changing the snake’s name, they They have prominent ears like Lafferty's Analoi. Again, palimphanic Lafferty.

One reason Lafferty appeals to me is his premodern approach to authorial distance. Lafferty (though exceptions do occur). It’s one reason he generally avoids first-person narration. As a result, Lafferty's trickiness arises not from unreliability but from concealment: logogriphs, clever Chapter 4, "People" Lafferty writes flat characters (again, with a handful of exceptions). While "Haruspex" may not be a Lafferty story readers revisit often, it does demonstrate how deeply Aquinas

And this week, it brought me back to Lafferty, whose fiction overflows with blood, but never without Lafferty’s readers have linked this obsession to Catholic martyrdom and the suffering of the saints in hagiography and visual art, Lafferty's wartime experiences, and the cartoonish violence of his high Years ago, Daniel Otto Petersen described Lafferty’s narratives as metaphysical slashers. How did Lafferty understand the metaphysical aspect of his slashers?