[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 woman, her New York apartment, her environment, her routine, and her emotionless sex life, is rendered in a series of paragraphs, recounted with a dead-pan neutrality of tone which Abish often employs in his stories. But before each paragraph, we find an alphabetic reordering of most (not all) of the words to come in the following grammatically conventional, paragraph. An example:

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a absolutely and at America American building certain convulsed croissant delicious eighth elongated floor four from height her in intended irony is it Lee munching no of one perfection perspective quite Sara she splendor standing taking the true windows with

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Standing at one of the elongated windows, munching a Sara Lee croissant (quite delicious) she is taking in the American perfection...