Permission
Consisting of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, "Permission" is the record of an experiment: an attempt to forge a connection with a stranger through the writing of a book. Part meditation, part narrative, part essay, it is presented to its addressee as a gift that asks for no thanks or acknowledgement--but what can be given in words, and what received? "Permission" not only updates the "epistolary novel" by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens a new literary frontier.
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S. D. Chrostowska is the author of "Literature on Trial: The Emergence of Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland & Russia, 1700-1800." She is Assistant Professor of European Studies in the Department of Humanities at York University.
One of the most intellectually bracing, technically fascinating Canadian-authored novels of the year.--Steven W. Beattie "Quill & Quire "
S. D. Chrostowska achieves unexpected buoyancy in spite of the intensity of her material. "Permission," certain to be among the most formally adventurous books published this year, will thrill readers of fearless stylists like Blanchot, Barthes, and Anne Carson. In its obsessive intricacy, it evokes even earlier forbears: those wonderfully melancholy European humanists, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton.'Every Library is a haunted cemetery, ' writes F. Wren, the narrator of "Permission." This fine and perplexing novel is itself something between a library and a cemetery, spinning around the hauntings of desire, the confusions of memory, the ambiguities of solitude and, above all, the mystery of writing.--Teju Cole
I found [ "Permission"] to be a complex, elusive, perplexing, and, at times, bold work that alternated between thrilling possibilities and frustrating gestures, but always a work that begged to be deeply pondered and reread.--Terry Pitts "3: AM "
I found ["Permission"] to be a complex, elusive, perplexing, and, at times, bold work that alternated between thrilling possibilities and frustrating gestures, but always a work that begged to be deeply pondered and reread.--Terry Pitts "3: AM "
