A collection of Lafferty's more coherent - or, at least less brain-knottingly, dimensionally gymnastic - short stories, published in the science fiction magazine Orbit. But even Lafferty's novels, really, were loosely strung-together short stories. This is an excellent introduction to Lafferty, and sequentially couldn't be better. The first, "Old Foot Forgot", was the first Lafferty I ever read and remains one of my favorites to this day. Lafferty skips with the nimbleness of a veteran cosmos-crawler between realms galactic and apparently commonplace - but the latter soon reveals its undercurrent of weirdness. Like PKD, Lafferty had an extraordinary talent for subtly braiding plot twists and also a gift for analogy and metaphor, though I have a feeling he would have claimed his stories were about nothing except themselves. His curmudgeonly disdain for the contemporary and mundane prairiedogs hilariously now & then... I recall specifically a line one of his characters delivers (paraphrased here): "Gestalt One is dreary and intolerable beyond belief. Its dwellers call it "Earth". May the lowest of us never sink so low!" I've truly read nothing else quite like Lafferty, which is, in part, why he's one of my favorite authors. I've never read anyone else so utterly unreliant on cliche and precedent. With Lafferty, I've laughed I've cried, I've surrendered to the obscure genius of passages whose meanings evade me even after repeated readings.