Finalist for the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montreal

"A writer may do as she pleases with her epoch. Rage accumulates."

From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l'ecriture-au-feminin in Quebec and continental New Narrative, these essays provide an evolutionary snapshot of Scott's ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. Scott herself points to the heart of this book, writing, "Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment."

With a Foreword by Zoe Whittall and an Afterword by Margaret Christakos.

About the Author
GAIL SCOTT is the author of Spare Parts (1981), Heroine (1987; finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction; re-issued in 2019 with an introduction by Eileen Myles), Main Brides (1993; finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), My Paris (1999), Spare Parts Plus Two (2002), and The Obituary (2010; shortlisted for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montreal), and Permanent Revolution (2021; finalist for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montreal). Her essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs (1989) and in La Theorie, un dimanche (1988) which was translated into English as Theory, A Sunday (2013). Scott is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004; shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction Anthologies). Her translation of Michael Delisle's Le desarroi du matelot was shortlisted for a 2001 Governor General's Literary Award. Scott lives in Montreal. ZOE WHITTALL has previously published five bestselling novels and three volumes of poetry, including The Fake and The Spectacular, The Best Kind of People, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and Bottle Rocket Hearts. Her work has won a Lambda Literary Award, the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy-Award winning comedy show Schitt's Creek and The Baroness Von Sketch Show for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. She was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and now lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario. MARGARET CHRISTAKOS is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work includes the afterword for the Le Grand Prix du livre de Montreal 2021 finalist, Permanent Revolutions, and the essay collection, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex, Blood, Loss & Selfies. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004-2005, served as Canada Council Writer in Residence at Western University in 2016-2017 and at the University of Alberta in 2017-2018, and as Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto (2018-2019).

Reviews
"Gail Scott convincingly and beautifully evokes feminism as an ongoing experimental practice: courageous, expansive, and necessary to all." -- Anne Boyer, author of The Undying, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
"At once erudite and intimate, Permanent Revolution is a vital set of meditations on difficulty and feminist art. Gail Scott convincingly and beautifully evokes feminism as an ongoing experimental practice: courageous, expansive, and necessary to all." -- Anne Boyer, author of The Undying, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
"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 ecriture 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


Awards
Short-listed for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montreal 2021 (Canada).



Book Information
ISBN 9781771666824
Author Gail Scott
Format Paperback
Page Count 164
Imprint Book*hug
Publisher Book*hug
Weight(grams) 431g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 13mm