Permission

by S D. Chrostowska

Overview

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, and thus a search for fellowship in solitude, as well as a testimony to the isolating effects and creative possibilities of the digital age. With reveries touching upon the insipid landscape of post-Cold War Poland, the elongated shadows of the Holocaust, and the narrator's "safe passage" to America, Permission not only updates the "epistolary novel" for our time by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens up a new literary frontier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564789785
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	07/02/2013
Series:	Canadian Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	201
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

3:AM - Terry Pitts

One of the most intellectually bracing, technically fascinating Canadian-authored novels of the year.

Quill & Quire - Steven W. Beattie

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