Walter Abish was an Austrian-born American author of experimental novels and short stories. His acclaimed novel How German Is It won a PEN/Faulkner prize for fiction in 1981. Among his honors, he was a fellow of the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations and of the National Endowment for the Arts. He also became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. Abish died at the age of ninety on May 28, 2022.