Walter Abish has been an important presence in contemporary fiction since the publication of his first novel, the playfully experimental Alphabetical Africa (1974). The appearance of two volumes of sh...
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Walter Abish is a writer who has managed to resolve successfully some of the prominent contradictions facing authors of contemporary fiction. He is a boldly innovative, critically acclaimed writer com...
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Critical Essay by James Knowlton
In I Am A Resident of An Ivory Tower Peter Handke discusses the relationship of literary fiction to the reality it explores and creates. Literary reality, as Handke se...
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Critical Essay by Jerome Klinkowitz
Can narrative be truly self-referential? Is it possible for a novelist, burdened with the conceptual weight of words and doubly hampered by the sequential order of ...
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Critical Essay by George Kearns
Walter Abish prefaces How German Is It with an epigraph from Jean-Luc Godard, "What is really at stake is one's image of oneself," a remark any nov...
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Critical Essay by John Updike
Walter Abish's [Alphabetical Africa is a] remarkable, ludicrously programmatic novel…. The adventure Mr. Abish Walter Abish 1931– Photograph by Kenne...
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Critical Essay by Daniel Levinson
Unpredictability is the key note to all [the stories in Minds Meet]. What is a reader to make of characters who wander in and out of separate stories, who take ...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
["The English Garden," the first story in Walter Abish's collection "In The Future Perfect,"] is a brilliant flirtation with severa...
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Critical Essay by Kenneth Baker
Walter Abish's fictions are hard to remember. One remembers the experience of them because they usually provoke feelings they do not resolve. But if someone asks...
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Critical Essay by Irving Malin
Walter Abish is a subversive writer. He is less interested in plot and character—at least what we conventionally mean by these terms—than in the words whic...
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Critical Essay by Tony Tanner
[Within In the Future Perfect] there is a piece entitled, meaningfully enough, "In So Many Words". This story, hardly a story, a fragmentary depiction of a ...
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Critical Essay by Paul West
Like snow, this novel [How German Is It] accumulates delicately, lulling the mind with an inaudible dream. At the same time, it keeps the reader busy since it permits, inde...
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Critical Essay by Betty Falkenberg
Mr. Abish's mind delights in dualities. His gift for irony feeds on the contradictions in human thought and action. All his writings are an assault on the rea...
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In the following survey of Abish's fiction, Klinkowitz argues that Abish uses postmodern and absurdist techniques and draws attention to them in order to undermine the uses of language that con...
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In the following essay, Arias-Misson argues that Abish deconstructs language by using devices like listing and counting the words used in his texts in order to show “the fictitious nature of ou...
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In the following review, Josipovici dismisses Abish's stories as banal and vulgar exercises in “American pseudo-experimentalism.”
“Remnants of the old atrocity subsist, but...
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In the following excerpt, Klinkowitz examines the techniques Abish has employed to create an “awareness of the author's role in the composition” of his fictions.
The novella ...
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In the following excerpt, Siegle examines how Abish uses language to undermine subjectivity, which, Abish argues, encourages the projection of presumed meaning onto ready surfaces, and prevents the di...
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In the following essay, Butler argues that although Abish's fiction challenges the idea that there can be an authoritative, self-centered narrative, it does not surrender a quest for meaning or...
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In the following essay, Varsava argues that a major theme in Abish's fiction is the tension between a superficial perfection and a profound moral and emotional void.
Viennese Jews, Walter Abish...
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In the following review, Doreski praises Abish's experimental artifice in constructing narratives from previously used sentences in 99: The New Meaning.
Walter Abish's new book [99: The ...
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In the following review of 99: The New Meaning, Metcalf discusses the importance of displacement and detachment in Abish's work.
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or...
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Walter Abish
