My pet theory is that Lafferty combined the bogey etymologies in Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (1872) Lafferty may then have grafted that figure onto the inexperienced creator imagined in Hume’s Dialogues Pass all that through Lafferty, and you get a vain craftsman who takes his creation of Bellota as proof Lafferty may have read Fiske firsthand; if so, I suspect he also encountered him through Sikes. Lafferty’s ending is a blackly comic version of that conjecture, which Hume voices through Philo, his

Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. November 7, of course, recurs throughout Lafferty’s work. Lafferty’s birthday had fallen on the preceding day, Monday, November 7. What set me thinking about this was an odd note in Lafferty’s papers.

The ethos of this blog can be found in Lafferty’s Serpent’s Egg (1987). That might be my favorite moment in Lafferty's work. It’s a book made entirely of strange turns, and throughout, Lafferty plays a game with the reader unlike Lafferty provides an essential piece of insetting in the first chapter: Through the night, [Constantine Current notes: Part of Lafferty's inspiration for Sandaliotis was Charles Fort's New Lands, 1923.

Paul Saka’s recent article on Lafferty raises questions about all this and touches directly on my interest in how Lafferty read 20th-century history. This has me thinking about Lafferty’s unpublished novel, Loup Garou, because of an interesting scene Lafferty had been working on the story since 1960. Saka has given Lafferty readers some powerful tools for doing so.

Usually, it’s Lafferty’s narrator, using his pragmatic marker trick. Lafferty writes: Listen, you high-old-time people, make your wants known now. The answer Lafferty invites is that it will absolutely be destroyed. There is no way Lafferty is not being highly ironic. There, Lafferty is plainly punning on sanctioned and sanctified.

Not infrequently, it is Lafferty. So Lafferty gives him what he wants. The synthetic and needled clarity is devastating. And this is how Lafferty says, “Choose.” Thomas, Lafferty liked to call the procession of the creatures. “Fog In My Throat” ranks among Lafferty’s finest short stories.

Some advanced Lafferty. I find Not to Mention Camels a hard book. Its components are easy enough to understand, but understanding what Lafferty is doing and how it fits As far as I can recall, this formula is unlike anything else in Lafferty. This time, though, Lafferty separates the Gnostic cosmos from our cosmos of Prime radically. With Lafferty there is always so much going on.

So Lafferty gives us the kind of miracle the Church could confirm. It is about to accelerate with an intensity rare even in Lafferty’s novels. Lafferty moves from leisurely assembly to frenetic action. Here, however, Lafferty gives us the reverse of that scene. Lafferty. As I read the novel, I see this as its central drama.

In “The Man Who Lost His Magic,” Lafferty takes aim at Jacob Grimm’s dream of the German state, a rationalizing In each story, Lafferty uses fields, meadows, and enchantment to point toward a wider circle of meaning After sketching the plot, I’ll say something about how Lafferty’s Catholicism shows up in the story. It plays with an anxiety that Lafferty returned to several times: the shape of the universe. His post-mortem star-sight is another instance of definalization in Lafferty.

is always interesting, and enough of the germs survive to make for a great essay on the topic of how Lafferty Here are a few of the ideas Lafferty had that became published stories (scroll down for the titles): these were all sections of one picture that showed the whole length of the river.

In the degraded form of the mechanical Mass on Astrobe, Lafferty makes it a point to say that the wine kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole Foreman’s aim—though he receives the Lafferty spermagos treatment for the way he pursues it—has always It is one of Lafferty’s statements about the spirit of Antichrist: the distortion of the past (extrapolation To treat it as incidental, or mainly as a symptom of Lafferty’s fondness for a drink or two, as I have

It belongs to a small group of stories that Lafferty never quite got right. This is the story I wish Lafferty had written. I think Lafferty was right. I want to give a few examples of why. Bataille could hardly have been more different from Lafferty. Bataille would have made Lafferty retch, but Lafferty was drawn to some of the same questions about human