Short Stories

Barnaby's Clock
—R. A. Lafferty


  •   · Excerpt    
      "“How old is saxophones?” “Born in the year 1840. The sire and inventor was Antoine Sax.” “How old is mice?” “Not old at all. About twenty-five million years old; almost the newest thing in animals. The first mouse, with no antecedents at all, popped out from behind a piece of baseboard quarter-round (in a cave, I suppose) just about that long ago.” “How old is Billy Dukes?”"  —R. A. Lafferty
         · 1974 Locus 13th, Best Short Fiction



Copyright & Licensing: If you submit a comment, you agree to license the original text of your comment as CC-BY-4.0, allowing others to share and adapt your comment for any purpose, even commercially, as long as attribution is given and changes are indicated. Please see the full license.

Literary criticism of Lafferty has been sparse, and valuable essays remain out of print due to unclear license or estate status. The CC-BY license provides an option for Lafferty scholars to republish and critique your writing, and enables Lafferty archivists to migrate comments to new platforms and media.