"For me, reading Lafferty was like looking into Chapman’s Homer. He interested me in SF again, after I had outgrown my early love for Simak and Asimov and Heinlein. What a word slinger: what a richness of idea and image, in Irish-cadenced prose! Lafferty wrote the opposite of the post-Chekhovian modern short story. Show don’t tell? The pleasure is in the telling. Rhetoric, in the grand old manner, was at the center of his game. He could go from high-faluting to just plain faluting, and back again, all in a paragraph. Like Charles Mingus, another American original, Lafferty loved the sounds he made; never satisfied with mere profundity, he was pretty, too. He was our Mingus, I think, elevating us all. And his stories always had a humanist agenda, though I understand he was a political conservative. … I believe his day is yet to come; that like Melville, Lafferty will be "discovered," and his Okla Hannali will take its rightful place as one of the three or four truly great 20th century American novels."
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Fantasy authorsScience fiction authors from the United StatesAbsurdistsNovelists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Terry Bisson, in "R.A. LAFFERTY (1914 - 2002)", a eulogy in LOCUS magazine
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty
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R. A. Lafferty
Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (7 November 1914 – 18 March 2002) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, famous for his humorous use of metaphor, narrative structure, and language in his very peculiar forms of etymological wit.
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