In the Future Perfect is Walter Abish’s third collection of fiction. Readers of his earlier prose works––Minds Meet and the novel Alphabetical Africa––will recognize the dead-pan humor that subverts familiar realities by reflecting on the nature of language itself rather than plot or narrative voice and line. With this ironic introduction of the unexpected, society’s most comfortable symbols––the icon of the model city, for example, or the sanctuary of the perfect home––come to delineate the very precariousness of our existence. In one of the nine stories included here, an American on his first trip abroad interviews a postwar German writer in a new town built on the site of a former concentration camp. In another, a successful woman executive, between elegant parties, swings with leather-jacketed motorcycle thugs in her impeccable Central Park West apartment. One of the leading lights in experimental letters in America, Walter Abish writes fiction that reflects on its own structure and confronts its characters with the preposterousness of their condition. “Is there any other way to live?” was the question reiterated in Minds Meet. To which the answer remains: “There is not, but we try.” (New Directions Publishing)