This Week in Google Alerts: R.A. Lafferty

Gwern Branwen · 16 Apr 2012, 14:27 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:27:12 -0400
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: R.A. Lafferty
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On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:
> if they did something similar with Lafferty I would almost certainly invest in it if the cost were at all reasonable, as I feel like the vast majority of his work is simply unavailable.

Probably:

> Mike Resnick had this to say about a visit he made to Lafferty's digs in the mid-1980s:
>
>> When I visited his house down in Oklahoma, I opened the guest closet to hang up my coat?and saw a 3-foot-high pile of manuscripts.  He told me they were his unsold books, he had just turned 70, and he wasn't writing another word until Virginia (Kidd, his agent) sold all of these.  She found a little press up in Minnesota, but she never did sell them all.  She used to cry on my shoulder that she and I and four dozen others thought he was one of the greatest short story writers alive . . . but she couldn't find 10,000 people to buy his paperbacks or even 500 to buy his signed, numbered hardcovers.
>
> Editor and anthologist Jonathan Strahan agrees, telling me "There's certainly a LOT of unpublished work.  About 16 novels and something like 80 short stories."
>
> ...(This bibliography is deliberately incomplete, as R. A. Lafferty wrote poetry extensively, and in the interests of space, I have omitted them here.  I would like to thank Jonathan Strahan for his invaluable help in compiling this bibliography.)

He had like 220 published short stories, so 'vast majority' is
probably wrong there, but I don't recall 16 published novels, and then
there's all the poetry and miscellaneous material.

> That was a strange event, the auctioning of his estate. So somebody bought it? ?Maybe this grad student did. Huh.

Oh, definitely not. If you look at the essay link, the circumstances
are odd - apparently Lafferty left his estate to all his relatives,
and he had a great deal of them. Splitting the meager royalties was
getting annoying so they decided to sell it all for a lump sum that
might be worth thinking about.

Well! One hopes Gene & Rosemary have better estate planning than
that... At least we don't have to worry about a huge unpublished
backlog since as far as I know, Wolfe only has a few things that
haven't been published judging from interviews.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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