By Gail Scott
Introduction by Kate Zambreno
Paperback: 9781628976830
eBook: 9781628976847
Publication Date: March 9th, 2027
Description
Casting light and shadow, looking backwards and forwards, My Paris is a hypnotizing tale of desire and nostalgia, submerging the reader in the endless—but not always seamless—sensuality of the City of Light.
A Canadian woman goes to Paris. She reads Balzac and Walter Benjamin, muses on philosophy and history, drinks cup after cup of coffee. Mostly, she watches Paris go by outside her window or across her TV screen: an endless, alluring of parade of artists, intellectuals, and sex workers. Or she roams the streets, caught between a nostalgic past and an often-tawdry present, between the city’s rich cultural traditions and the realities of Western imperialism. Disillusioned by her inability to reconcile these contradictions and by her own part in perpetuating them, she assembles a book made from luminous fragments, a living constellation.
Featuring a new introduction by Kate Zambreno.
Biographical Note
Gail Scott received the 2024 Mavis Gallant award for her memoir Furniture Music, tracking daily life, writing and politics in a group of downtown Manhattan poets in the critical early Obama moment. She is a two-time finalist for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal for Permanent (upside down) Revolution, about radical prose writing across the continent, and for her novel The Obituary, a tale of suppressed history in postmillennial Montréal. Other novels include Heroine, set in turbulent 1980s Montréal, and My Paris, whose sad diarist seeks a lost avant-garde in 90s Paris. A Governor General finalist for fiction translation, she lives in Montréal.
Kate Zambreno is the author of more than ten books that confound genre—variously novels, speculative essays and reports, performative lectures—including Heroines, Drifts, Book of Mutter, The Light Room, To Write as if Already Dead, and Animal Stories. They also co-authored, with Sofia Samatar, a work of experimental criticism, Tone. Forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 are two novels of interiority and precarity, Foam and Performance Art. Against Nonfiction: Writing Through Capitalist Realisms, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in Spring 2027. They are a doctoral student in Performance Studies at NYU, thinking through resistance and duration.