“In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there lived a writer who at one time was the best writer of short fiction in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty" (Neil Gaiman). For the first time in Russian - a selection of the best stories of "the most original of our writers" (Gene Wolfe), "our North American unrecognized Marquez" (Terry Bisson), "the craziest, most colorful and unexpected living author" (Theodore Sturgeon), one of those "unique writers who created their own literary language from scratch" (Michael Swanwick). Some of the stories of the modern classic have been translated into Russian since the 1960s, but this is the first time they have been published as a book. Moreover, each story is accompanied by a foreword (and sometimes an afterword) by such masters of the genre as Neil Gaiman, Samuel Delaney, Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis, John Scalzi, Jeff Vandermeer and many, many others, fascinated by its “paradoxes and contradictions ... crazy ideas and sharp humor" (Michael Swanwick). Lafferty's heroes can make and lose four fortunes in eight hours, hide an entire valley in a five-foot ditch, create a week of terror on the main street with the help of a seven-day vanisher, thwart the plans of Charlemagne, ride through the galaxy in a tin can, make a philosophical concept out of iron, solve a riddle The valleys of old spaceships on the planet of Thieving Bears and win non-calendar days from God himself... “He was his own genre, and his stories were not like anyone else: lying tales that started in Ireland and arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with transfers to The heavens and the distant stars" (Neil Gaiman).