Alphabetical Africa is a constrained writing experiment by Walter Abish. It is written in the form of a novel.

A paperback edition was issued in New York by New Directions Publishing Corporation in 1974 with ISBN 0-8112-0533-9. It was still in print in 2004.

[edit] The Constraint

The writing is constrained by an interesting pseudo-alliterative rule: the first chapter contains only words starting with the letter a, the second chapter only words starting with a or b, etc.; each subsequent chapter adds the next letter in the alphabet to the set of allowed word beginnings. This continues for the first 26 chapters, until at last Abish is (briefly) allowed to write without constraint.

In the second half of the book, chapters 27 through 52, letters are removed in the reverse order that they were added. Thus, z words disappear in chapter 28, y, in chapter 29, etc..

Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931) is an American author of experimental novels and short stories.

Abish was born in Vienna, Austria. 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.