Minds Meet

by Walter Abish

Paperback

Published January 1, 1975

About the author

Walter Abish was an American author of experimental novels and short stories.

At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1960. Since 1975, Abish has taught at several eastern universities and colleges. Abish received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 for his book How German Is It?. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Abish's work shows both imaginative and experimental elements. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter "A." In the second chapter, words beginning with "B" appear, and so on through the alphabet. In the Future Perfect is a collection of short stories where words are juxtaposed in unusual patterns.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

HOUSEKEEPING 2025

7 years later and I'm no less flushed with ardor (or Ada) for all things Abish. This and his other shorts all deserve to be reread soon. Bonus: just a super rad pop/op-art dustjacket to impress stoners with; trust me, I've tried it on friends. 'Trippy' is the most common adjective, but said with that looooooong stoner drawl.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

For many writers, all stories are ultimately the same. Walter Abish, an OuLiPo associate who cites Robert Smithson by name (in short, Pincusbait), weaves a tangled web of fascinating fixations - he’s interested in deserts of the mind, systems of communication and the ways they can be perverted, the global Vienna, the allure of fascism - and without fail, they all point towards the central interest in the seductive powers women have over men, a tremendously boring thing to examine in this much depth which this much extraordinary window dressing. Still a good collection, if a bit front-loaded - one story, The Istanbul Papers, even deploys this central fixation with actual satirical aim, chronicling an American attaché conned into a scandalous relationship with Hitler’s secret daughter to distract the media from the Bay of Pigs, but for the most part, I read this as having a deep and genuine interest in dissecting the fascination women’s legs cause. A little bit lame. Thankfully it’s all exquisitely written. I would like to read Abish’s poetry at some point.