Short Fiction
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Though often packed into the genre of science fiction, R. A. Lafferty might fit better into a category of the bizarre. Through a blend of folk storytelling, American tall tales, science fiction, and fantasy, all infused with his devout Catholicism, he has created an inimitable, genre-bending, sui generis style.
Lafferty has received many Hugo and Nebula Award nominations and won the Best Short Story Hugo in 1973.
Collected here are all of his public domain short stories, all of which were originally published in science fiction pulp magazines in the 1960s.
These wildly inventive, often darkly comic tales showcase a writer unlike any other, one whose strange visions of first contact, small-town eccentricity, and cosmic mischief have earned him a devoted cult following among readers of speculative fiction.
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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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