- http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.com/2014/08/lafferty-news-thats-right-news.html
- http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/13/ra-lafferty-secret-sci-fi-genius-poised-for-comeback
"RA Lafferty — the secret sci-fi genius more than ready for a
comeback: A reissue of the US science fiction writer RA Lafferty's
stories sold out rapidly this year, and his fans, including Neil
Gaiman, hope to see his novels reprinted"
2 quoted lines
There's something of the Irish comic tradition in there, the
absurdity and surreality of Flann O'Brien, author of The Third Policeman. "I agree," says the author Neil Gaiman. "And there's kinship with the American tall tale tradition, and with GK Chesterton.
But they are all only cousins. There's nothing close to Lafferty — nobody with the gravitas about things that were light, and the antigravitas about important heavy things."...Gaiman has been a Lafferty enthusiast since he was nine, and discovered the writers' work in various anthologies. He attempted a story in Lafferty style — Sunbird, in his collection Fragile Things — which he said proved to him "mostly how much harder" the style was than it looked. "What drew me to his work? The narrative voice, I think," says Gaiman. "The way he'd construct a story — unlike the way anyone else did it. The peculiar rightness of his worldview, and the topsy-turvy nature of it. The sentences." A few years after his initial discovery, Gaiman struck up a correspondence with Lafferty. He remembers: "I sent him a Lafferty pastiche I had written, and he was not rude about it. But he was encouraging, and informative, and took me very seriously, which is good, because I was about 20 and took myself very seriously as well."
6 quoted lines
..."Lafferty himself said his short stories were better, but his novels had more to say," says Andrew Ferguson. "The stories are always worth going back to, but it's the novels on which his long-term literary reputation will rest."Ferguson is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, and along with Gaiman's championing he's one of the reasons Lafferty is perhaps being pulled back from the brink of total obscurity — he's writing a biography of the author for the University of Illinois Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, and will chair a panel on Lafferty on 14 August at Loncon, the World Science Fiction Convention, being held at London's Docklands. Ferguson says: "It may be a bit of a cliche, but there's really nothing else out there comparable to him. He's one of the distinctive prose stylists in the genre: you can tell a Lafferty story within a sentence. He's a very funny writer, in a field that has often taken itself way too seriously." Curiously, though largely out of print in the west, the writer is big in Japan, says Ferguson, where "Lafferty has remained popular for decades ".
[This surprises me; I read a lot of Japanese stuff but I've
never seen R.A. Lafferty come up.]
...Ferguson says: "I'm hoping the Centipede Press editions get licensed for a more affordable edition eventually. I think there'd definitely be readers for a big best of Lafferty retrospective."
That's something Gaiman would like to see, too : "I'd love to see a Complete Lafferty in print. I used to give people his short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, until one day it was out of print and gone."
2 quoted lines
It's hard to say why, if Lafferty was so brilliant — which he
was — he's virtually unknown. David Langford, the noted science-fiction commentator, wrote in his regular SF news bulletin Ansible, after Lafferty's death in March 2002: "The World Fantasy Convention belatedly did the decent thing and honoured RA Lafferty with its lifetime achievement award in 1990. But the SF world never honoured him enough. Major publishers abandoned him in the mid-80s:
Lafferty was just too dementedly brilliant for them."
gwern
http://www.gwern.net