Book cover for The Best of R. A. Lafferty by R A Lafferty

The Best of R. A. Lafferty

2021 Released
416 Pages
7-8 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Tor BooksISBN 9781250778680

Tor Essentials presents science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was an American original, a teller of acute, indescribably loopy tall tales whose work has been compared to that of Avram Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Gene Wolfe.

The Best of R. A. Lafferty presents 22 of his best flights of offbeat imagination, ranging from classics like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and “The Primary Education of the Cameroi” to his Hugo Award-winning “Eurema’s Dam.”

Introduced by Neil Gaiman, the volume also contains story introductions and afterwords by, among many others, Michael Dirda, Samuel R. Delany, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Robson, Harlan Ellison, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Patton Oswalt.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

R A Lafferty

R. A. Lafferty was one of the most original and unpredictable voices in twentieth-century science fiction and fantasy. Born in Iowa and long associated with Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lafferty came late to professional fiction but quickly developed a reputation for stories unlike anyone else's: comic, theological, folkloric, grotesque, learned, exuberant, and structurally strange. His prose often sounds as though tall tale, myth, barroom anecdote, Catholic metaphysics, and science fiction had been fused into a single impossible instrument.Lafferty's best-known works include the novel Past Master and the story collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? His fiction resists easy classification, but that resistance is precisely what has kept it alive for generations of readers and writers. He brought to science fiction a wildness of voice and imagination that made even familiar premises feel newly dangerous, comic, and uncanny.

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