R.A. Lafferty (1914-2002) is best known for his idiosyncratic science fiction and fantasy. He used Native American and Irish storytelling traditions not typically found in those genres, combined with quirky twists of language and narrative structure, to create stories that often read like tall tales. In his introduction to "Sunbird" in the short story collection Fragile Things (2006), Neil Gaiman wrote: "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."Lafferty wrote 32 books and more than 200 short stories, not all of which are science fiction or fantasy. Four of his books are autobiographical, one is a nonfiction work about the Roman Empire, and several are historical fiction. Okla Hannali (1972) follows Hannali Innominee, a folkloric 19th-century Choctaw Indian with great strength, keen senses and good luck. Lafferty weaves this larger-than-life figure with the tragic history of the Choctaw. Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), called Okla Hannali "art applied to history so that the legend of the Choctaws, their great and small men, their splendid humor, and their tragedies are filled with life and breath." It is available from University of Oklahoma Press ($19.95, 9780806123493). --Tobias Mutter