Permanent Revolution: Essays

By Gail Scott

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’écriture-au-féminin in Québec 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771666848

Gail Scott

Gail Scott is the author of the novels Main Brides (Toronto: Coach House, 1993), Heroine (Coach House, 1987; Talon, 1997), and My Paris (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1999), a collection of short stories, Spare Parts (Coach House, 1982), the essay collection Spaces like Stairs (Toronto: Women's Press, 1989), and la théorie, un dimanche (co–authored with Nicole Brossard et al., remue–ménage, 1988). She has been short–listed twice for the QSPELL (Quebec English-–language fiction) award. A former journalist who has worked for Canada's leading newspapers, she is also a founding editor of the Montreal French-–language cultural journal Spirale, and the bilingual journal of women's writing, Tessera. Her translations include France Théoret's Laurence, and The Sailor's Disquiet, and Helen with a Secret, both by Michael Delisle.