Abish, Walter
Abish, Walter( 1931– ),born in Austria, reared in China, took U.S. citizenship in 1960, and taught for ten years at Columbia University. Abish was a MacArthur Prize fellow (“the genius award”), and his fiction is experimental: for example, Alphabetical Africa (1974), a novel wherein every word of the first chapter begins with the letter A; the second with A or B; the third with A, B, or C. At Z the process reverses: the final chapter has words again beginning with A. Another novel, How German Is It (1980), received the PEN Faulkner Award (1981). Not as formally mannered as his previous novel, it concerns an American of German parentage and his return to a small German town to investigate his father's wartime death, and to answer his own question, how German am I? Abish has a volume of poetry, Duel Site (1970), and collections of short stories in Minds Meet (1975) and In the Future Perfect (1977). Later...
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