(urth) Sorcerer's House Comment

Daniel Petersen danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com
Thu May 3 14:00:02 PDT 2012


Aside from some of his own great stuff, I'll never stop liking and being
grateful to Neil for bigging up my two faves:  Wolfe and Lafferty.  From
the same interview:

*If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would
you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?*

As a teenager I wrote to R. A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with
letters that were like R. A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical
answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

He was a sui generis writer, the oddest and most frustratingly delightful
of American tall-tale tellers. Not a lot of people have read him, and even
fewer like what he wrote, but those of us who like him like him all the
way. We never met.

The last time I wrote to Lafferty, he had Alzheimer’s and was in a home in
Oklahoma, shortly before his death, and I do not believe he read or
understood the letter, but it made me feel like I was doing something right
by writing it and sending it.

-DOJP

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Fred Kiesche <godelescherbach at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
>
> =====
>
>
> *What was the last truly great book you read?*
>
> “The Sorcerer’s House,” by Gene Wolfe, amazed me. It was such a cunning
> book, and it went so deep. A foxy fantasy about a house that grows, with
> chapters that are the Greater Trumps of a tarot deck.
> =====
>
> --
> F.P. Kiesche III  "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book.
> Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on
> being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)
> Blogging at The Lensman's Children (
> http://theeternalgoldenbraid.blogspot.com/).
>
>
>
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