Walter Abish's Books

Ulrich Hargenau testifies against fellow members of a German terrorist group in order to save himself and his wife, Paula, and contemplates the nature of his German heritage.

A "linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the 'geoglyphic' African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll."--Back cover.

Ulrich Hargenau testifies against fellow members of a German terrorist group in order to save himself and his wife, Paula, and contemplates the nature of his German heritage.

Among the multifaceted characters whose lives interlock are Alejandro, a once-prominent literary critic fallen into disfavor; his estranged wife, Mercedes, whom he suspects of openly conducting an affair with an American writer; Bonny, the writer's runaway daughter, who is made to witness a calamitous sequence of events that culminates in murder; Preston, an American industrialist, and his sexually frustrated wife, Rita; and the unscrupulous art dealer Pech. As the lives of these people press together, as they buckle and collapse, the novel holds up a mirror to a moment in which we lived--the end of a millennium, of an era-- and to the perils, temptations, and hysteria that lie just below the surface.

Walter Abish has dovetailed his novel within a Procrustean scheme that has the terrifying and irrefutable logic of the alphabet. Alphabetical Africa is in the line of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews, who have used constrictive forms to penetrate the space on the other side of poetry." -- John Ashbery

Fiction. Art. Five collage textswith six photographs by Cecile Abish. The five stories that make up 99: THE NEW MEANING are created entirely from fragments of other works. From Abish's introduction: "These works were undertaken in a playful spirit—not actually 'written' but orchestrated. The fragmented narrative can be said to function as a kind of lure—given the constraints, anything else would be beyond its scope. In using selected segments of published texts authored by others as the exclusive 'ready made' material for these five 'explorations,' I wanted to probe certain familiar emotional configurations afresh, and arrive at an emotional content that is not mine by design.

The journals, published posthumously in 1898, of a self-educated man who worked in the Royal Society's library for forty years.

Book's by Walter Abish

How German is it

How German is it

Alphabetical Africa

Alphabetical Africa

How German is it

How German is it

Eclipse Fever

Eclipse Fever

Alphabetical Africa

Alphabetical Africa

99, the New Meaning

99, the New Meaning

The Journals of Walter White

The Journals of Walter White

The Way it was

The Way it was

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