Permanent Revolution

With a Foreword by Zoe Whittall. "A writer may do as she pleases with her epoch. Except ignore it," says Gail Scott. Permanent Revolution traces her seminal investigation of prose experiment to the present, including a recreation of the iconic text Spaces Like Stairs, in a collection of essays relating the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. "Where there is no emergency there is likely no real experiment," she writes.In conversation with other writers across the continent identified with current queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l’écriture-au féminin moment in Québec, and queer continental New Narrative, Permanent Revolution is an evolutionary snapshot of contemporaneous Fe-male ground-breaking prose.With Permanent Revolution, Scott interrogates her era, twice. Belonging in the canon alongside Maggie Nelson, Lydia Davis and Renee Gladman, Gail Scott is an important feminist thinker of our time. Praise for Permanent Revolution: "Permanent Revolution is written in the gap between what a novel could have been and what is possible now, and that's a kind of grammar. Reading these essays, I felt the part of me that never writes, but longs to, come back to life for a few moments and/or forever." —Bhanu Kapil "I can still remember the thrill of first entering the space of Gail Scott's novel, My Paris, a diary written all in present participles, the way I stumbled along the sentences as if around a city. In these essays we get to travel through Scott's thinking through narrative, gender and queer aesthetics, from philosophizing her own experiments in prose to being in conversation with the écriture feminine of friends, from Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert to New Narrative. She also writes through her literary foremothers, from Kathy Acker through the trilogy of the "masturbating French dykes" (ha!) (Irigaray, Cixous, Wittig) to Marguerite Duras. It was Duras's nonfiction I thought about when reading Permanent Revolution—profound and poetic, enacting the urgency of literature amidst the emergencies of now." —Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines and Drifts