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.

S. D. Chrostowska is Professor of Humanities and Social & Political Thought at York University, Toronto. She is the author of Literature on Trial: The Emergence of Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland, and Russia, 1700-1800 (2012); Permission: A Novel (2013); and Matches: A Light Book (2015, 2nd enlarged ed. 2019), and co-editor of Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (2017). She currently lives in Toronto. 

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