Over the last year of reading Lafferty, I’ve repeatedly found myself adjusting my assumptions about what Lafferty (he was, weirdly, O’Connor’s senior), O’Connor, and Tartt: three prickly southern Catholics. Finally, the influence of Origen on Lafferty was deeper and more enduring than I had realized. It sent me back to Origen, and, again, it is a sad fact that a catalogue of Lafferty’s library was not Lafferty was the product of an Augustinian formation impressed by Leonine neo-scholasticism, and this

Janifer intuited that Lafferty’s oceanic novels are about the third question, and he wrestled with how He called the piece a rave for the next book Lafferty would write. Janifer nailed it, but he didn’t recognize that Lafferty had already decided not to give the kind of idiotic false hope for autotelic completion displaced onto things—one of the heresies of the Modernism Lafferty revealed—and something to reject at all costs, in Lafferty’s view.

keep playing around with the idea that Harry Stephen Keeler’s webwork might help us understand what Lafferty What I have done is use ideas about Lafferty and world-creation to build a model that tracks causality You can find it on the bar, along with the new Lafferties section, which includes a trivia game.

Lafferty seems to suggest that true justice is elusive, especially when violence and greed are involved Lafferty also targets what we now call identity politics (a term coined in 1977). This is consistent with the larger pattern of Lafferty’s work: political idealism and structural rot This is Lafferty holding up a mirror to human brutality. Beneath the wit, Lafferty is saying something brutal about real tendencies.

— Serpent’s Egg Lafferty sent this little piece off on February 2, 1975, for the “Oklahoma Authors” It appeared eight months later in the October issue, alongside a great Lafferty photograph and a bibliography Lafferty dutifully begins with a brief account of his life and work, then turns to a question that really Lafferty thinks the category arts can help bring them together, with science fiction the likeliest to What I like most is how unapologetic Lafferty is, how willing to spike the librarians’ punch.

Lafferty is metafictional. The killer was never in doubt. Then Lafferty lets something drop in the very last lines of the story. Lafferty’s story is concerned with the second, not the first. Lafferty on a grim promontory with respect to his own art accords with no Lafferty I have read. Lafferty knew what he was doing.

At the last minute, Lafferty changed his mind. Lafferty is a labyrinth. I think Lafferty had sound judgment here. It offers something like a psychological portrait, or as close to one as Lafferty would give, while remaining Again, Lafferty uses genre to point it up.

Seven years later, in The Material Basis of Evolution, he gave Lafferty the ammunition: I think that Lafferty has a lot of fun with this kind of wrangling. Readers who do enjoy it will likely take it as Lafferty being silly. California satire? Check. Of course, Lafferty does not argue directly in his fiction. This is Lafferty’s least imaginative anti-evolution allegory.

Of course, Lafferty didn’t write straight adventure fiction, and he didn’t write juveniles, but among There is a section of Lafferty’s ghost story that focuses on the cave and the pit as heterotopia and In the first part of In a Green Tree, My Heart Leaps Up, Lafferty wrote his great set piece on children Lafferty establishes the situation in fine boys' fiction fashion. Lafferty abandoned it. But he did not stop thinking about caves.

Lafferty wrote a sequel to “Quiz Ship Loose” that has never been published. Had Lafferty wanted to save the story, he would have next typed it out on carbons. Quiz Ship Crag one of Lafferty’s many character reduplications. The story follows six of them, whom Lafferty describes as a mimic-morphic race of hardy workers. conceals yet another Lafferty meditation on the constitutive power of reality manipulation.

.” — Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire (1974) "Other Side of the Moon” is early Lafferty. This is one of the first Lafferty stories I read. I’m not sure why. First, it takes on a writerly problem Lafferty kept returning to: how to handle too many characters. Second, it has Lafferty themes that would grow more radical and experimental over time. But Lafferty hasn’t arrived at the Ghost Story yet.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto III Those of us who spend time with Lafferty's fiction This led me to the idea of "Thinking With Lafferty," a tag I took from a terrific work on Alfred North I hope that Lafferty readers eventually build a conceptual toolkit, a "bric-a-brac" for reading him. When Lafferty stopped writing, he offered a sad, self-deprecating reason: he said he was writing drivel I’ve found myself looking for a concept to explain how Lafferty portrays media as a driving force in