Roger

That was my last letter, too. I used to try such letters in alphabetical order until I realised it was much easier to hit them in keyboard order!

That page and the help page <a href="https://help.nytimes.com/360052406391-The-New-York-Times-Crossword-Puzzle" target="_blank">https://help.nytimes.com/360052406391-The-New-York-Times-Crossword-Puzzle</a> both say that the Escape key enters rebus mode. I gather from other comments that it's now the Insert key, which makes more sense, but the change (if deliberate) should have been announced.

As a Kiwi/Brit, I picked up on the US-history theme in the clues and once I realised that some cells contained state abbreviations (in the northeast US?) I found it pretty straightforward to complete (without lookups). I imagine it might have been harder if I (thought I) knew which were the original 13 and was trying to find places for them. The only thing that really slowed me down was that Esc for rebus mode no longer worked.

@Shan Those were the two wrong letters I had to Google my way out of.

@Leslie A The translator for _A Void_ was Gilbert Adair, who died in December 2011. Other English translations of _La Disparition_ are _Vanish'd!_ by John Lee, _Omissions_ by Julian West and _A Vanishing_ by Ian Monk, who died in September this year. So the obituary was probably Monk's.

@Matt I think I'm at a safe enough distance to mention that I remembered PERIPETEIA from secondary school (50 years ago) and confidently wrote it in from PER. But perhaps my career in cryptic crosswords qualifies me as a classicist.