My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. In discussing The Elliptical Grave as a Lost Race novel, I focused on Lafferty's recurring exploration Lafferty's intuition about artificial intelligence's moral and spiritual dilemmas is remarkable. Lafferty’s Past Master. Capital and authority could concentrate inside fortified enclaves that echo Lafferty’s Cosmopolis, while

This is a long Lafferty story, but an exceptionally smart one. There are so many ways into it. As far as I know, no one has written about the moral economy of smell in Lafferty’s work. It dazzles, with Lafferty juggling language to track people who aren't what they seem. Lafferty begins by introducing Simon Radert and his wife, Norah. At the airport, Lafferty stages one of his finest set pieces involving identity exchange.

Forty-Seventh Island” Someone on East of Laughter once said “The Forty-Seventh Island” isn’t one of Lafferty The catalogue of planets, however, is one of the most memorably grumpy things Lafferty ever cooked up with hammer and tongs, but they all get absorbed into a single triumphal history of progress, what Lafferty Anyway, I thought it would be fun to fly through Lafferty’s catalogue, so I put this together for myself I need to update the descriptions in the fly-by: Mordecai is Karl Marx, whose real name was Mordechai

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.

One reason Lafferty fascinates me is his deep, almost instinctive grasp of the odd, intricate layers If Lafferty often criticized the goldsmithing of others, we should consider how he worked his own. If Lafferty’s gold has already been purified and remade, a critical re-melt carries the risk of turning flesh by a blind adherence to the letter." — On Christian Doctrine, III.5 One challenge in reading Lafferty mistakes: mistaking the Christ gold of Bezalel for the calf gold of Aaron, or falling into the error Lafferty

One of Lafferty's underappreciated masterworks is "Scorner's Seat", published twice in quick succession That was Lafferty's favorite metaphor for sending his fiction off into the world. It is one of the Lafferty stories that sticks in my head, a deeply personal piece of art, with just so The story itself is something of an intellectual love poem to Lafferty's mythically inclined correspondent Lafferty once mused to her about when he first realized that the "archetypal-underneath" is a vital aspect

When Lafferty returned to the material, lifting large pieces and discarding others, he kept the horns By this point in his career, Lafferty had developed his own symbolic economy of horns, visible in stories All this is to say, Lafferty’s novel keeps returning to the same cluster of associations: Aurelia is Literate Americans of Lafferty’s generation would have immediately associated it with one of the most Lafferty had used this kind of transformational device several times by this point in his career.

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’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work It carries both the part-to-whole relationship of metonymy and the structural resemblance of iconicity Lafferty does not confine this technique to individual stories. Lafferty writes: They climbed. And then they climbed more steeply. And we know what Lafferty does.

I’ve been working on Okla Hannali and thinking about Lafferty's first draft in ‘63. It’s usually said, based on what Lafferty himself disclosed in interviews, that the novel draws heavily Given Lafferty’s Irish heritage and his deep interest in Choctaw and Irish history, it seems plausible While the novel is largely built from oral histories, important sources such as John Swanton, and personal

Zornig is one of Lafferty’s unlikeable martinets. That did not happen until 2025, when it appeared in Volume 8 of the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty “All But the Words,” by contrast, seems to me an exceedingly minor Lafferty story. Instead, Lafferty tells the story from the other side, from the side of the colonizers. Lafferty finished "The Pani Planet" in July 1963, a few months after completing Okla Hannali.

Lafferty indeed hated Marxists. Lafferty reviled California as the years went on. Lafferty also said something he took quite seriously. That Lafferty wrote lafferties is a cute one. He will always have that around his neck. saying this somehow makes Lafferty not dogmatic, not thinking about how it might connect with Lafferty You can see why Lafferty liked it.