Editing R. A. Lafferty (section)

==Writing style==
In his 2006 short story collection ''[[Fragile Things]]'', [[Neil Gaiman]] includes a short story called "Sunbird" written in the style of Lafferty. In the introduction, he says this about Lafferty:<blockquote> There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable -- you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.<br>"Sunbird" was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look....<ref>Introduction to ''Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders'' by Neil Gaiman, William Morrow Publisher (2006), pg. xxvii</ref></blockquote>

Gaiman and Lafferty had corresponded for several years during Gaiman's adolescence; he remembered Lafferty's letters as "filled with typical cock-eyed Lafferty humour and observations, wise and funny and sober all at once."<ref>"Lafferty", Neil Gaiman, ''Locus'', May 2002, pg. 68.</ref>

Per ''[[The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction]]'': <blockquote>He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone was fundamentally oral; his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he wrote (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old Mythologies, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times paid scant attention to the niceties of plotting; he has been understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist; he was technically inventive, but lunged constantly into a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative, and only occasionally, of anything like the traditional Sense of Wonder; his skill in the deploying of various rhetorical narrative voices was manifest, but these voices were sometimes choked in baroque flamboyance. ... He and [[Gene Wolfe]] have more than a shared faith in common.<ref name=SF>{{cite encyclopedia|title=Lafferty, R.A.|encyclopedia=The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction|url=https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lafferty_r_a|year=2023|access-date=10 January 2024}}</ref></blockquote>