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Gail Scott’s prose works are laboratories for concocting tales about cities across language/genre/gender boundaries. She is the author of Furniture Music (Wave Books, 2023). Her 2021 poetics, Permanent Revolution, engaging with radical prose writers across the continent , was short-listed for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Other acclaimed city novels include The Obituary, a fractalled tale of suppressed diversity in post-millennial Québec, also a Grand Prix finalist; Heroine, about radical art and politics in turbulent 80s Montréal; and My Paris, about a sad diarist looking for a lost avant-garde in 90s Paris. Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le désarroi du matelot was a Governor General finalist. She won major studio grants (Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) for New York and Paris. She was an invited writer at Brown, UCSD, University of Alberta, and Université de Montréal, where she taught creative writing for fifteen years. Scott lives in Montréal.
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Reviews
For GS, working to create a modern heroine, the question is how to live in the present — that “small point” (figured, in the bathtub, by her clitoris and the narrow threshold of climax). Her relentless delving into the past signals not only obsession or melancholy, but an impulse to interrogate history, even as she strives to create something new.
LARB on Heroine
As a Canadian, Scott is both inside and outside the loop of American electoral politics, and she captures the Obama years in a way no one else has. She’s American enough not to be shocked by the spectacular quality of the electoral news cycle, but far enough away to observe this phenomenon with cool clarity. It’s a difficult book, just like real life.
Chris Kraus
These were the shortest sentences I’d ever seen, yet they were not the kind of sentences that allowed you to rest when you reached the end of them. They pointed always to the one up ahead … They pushed you off a balcony; they caused fissures in your reading mind.
Renee Gladman, Calamities
So what I mainly want to assert is that Heroine is more a work of reading than of writing, it is all studio, by which I mean it’s something fabulously risky and alive. It’s literature and the possibility of it
Eileen Myles, Paris Review on Heroine
Heroine is a bold, transfixing work, earthy and raw, dreamlike and strangely elegant, threaded through with winding sentences, peppered with lines and conversations in French (a vivid rendering of the life of an Anglophone in a Francophone culture). It retains all of its original, revolutionary force not just because of that stylistic daring, however, but because many of its concerns remain, in suitably shifting forms, to be key concerns today.
Toronto Star
Reviews of books by Gail Scott
Furniture Music -
Interviews
-Gail Scott in conversation with Jane Malcom in Jacket2
-Gail Scott with Melissa Bull in Maisonneuve
-Gail Scott with Gillian Lane-Mercier in SCL/ÉLC -
Audio
-Gail Scott in conversation with Christy Davids in Jacket2
-Gail Scott on PennSound
Video
Gail Scott in conversation with Lisa Roberton for Permanent Revolution book launch:
Gail Scott reads from Permanent Revolution:
