I love Lafferty so much. No one has a voice quite like his. ( )

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty plays with words like François Rabelais, but unlike his French renaissance precursor, he also tells infuriatingly clever stories. This is a collection of some of his best short works including those of the tall tale variety, those of the shaggy dog story variety, some of the magic realism variety, and some of the pure fantasy variety, some of the science fiction variety, and many of the implied social criticism variety. And like fellow authors J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor, underlying all of them is his religious faith. ( )

Way back when many of the stories collected in this anthology were published in magazines and anthologies, I used to search the contents tables for stories carrying Lafferty's name. They were always strange and wonderful in every way possible, from his characters' names to his language to his plots and endings. This is a stellar collection of Lafferty's short fiction, I hope it spurs readers to discover or rediscover his longer works as well! ( )

Lafferty, R. A. The Best of R. A. Lafferty. Edited by Jonathan Strahan. Tor, 2019.
R. A. Lafferty, 1914-2002, wrote most of his science fiction between 1960 and 1980. During the 1960s, he worked fulltime as an electrical engineer, but his career literary output was prodigious: 32 novels and 200 short stories. He won Hugo nominations for his first novel and for three of his short stories. The agent who manages his literary estate still holds a cache of unpublished manuscripts.
Each of the stories in this collection is introduced by a major writer who has been influenced by him. The list includes Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, and Samuel R. Delany, and other well-established writers in the field. They are unanimous in saying that he is a “writer’s writer.” Most are grateful for his influence, but Delany, who began writing about the same time Lafferty did, seems miffed to be so often compared with him. Faulkner had a similar reaction to being compared to James Joyce. As much as other writers admired his work, I bet Lafferty had a lot of rejection slips from editors who did not know what to make of him. His prose style displays a wry, understated sense of humor. It combines a colloquial working-class slang with occasional words that can send readers to the dictionary to check the etymology. His narrative structures are tightly compressed but often have double or triple twists that spin the reader’s head around. There are echoes of fables and folktales from several cultures. The combination often reminds me of such diverse writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Roger Zelazny, Cordwainer Smith, Flannery O’Connor, and John Barth. Lafferty’s bio makes his education seem spotty, but he knew history, languages, science, philosophy, and plains Indian culture. His symbolism is never straightforward and his humor is often undercut by pessimism as characters find that wrestling with the gods is dangerous and that the universe is a much stranger place than they imagined.
Let me discuss just one of the stories—and, warning, I cannot do it without spoilers, and I cannot do it justice. “Sky” begins with a man coming up out of a mine to sell some skydivers some sky. It should bother us a little that one of the skydivers is named Icarus, and one of them seems to be herself almost lighter than air. Their pilot takes them up to a high altitude and they begin to inject, smoke, and snort the sky they bought from the man in the mine. They go higher, talking like hippies on an acid trip that gives them the sense that they are immortal and exist outside time. And maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. Some of the skydivers have chutes. Some don’t. Maybe that matters. Maybe not. And there are more twists to come.
I have not read Lafferty for years, and that is a failing I intend to remedy. This collection of excellent short stories Is a good route back into his work. Lafferty was a unique talent. 5 stars. ( )