My Paris - (Essentials) by Gail Scott (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio in this stunning autofiction. Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's designer clothing across the boulevard. Or she roams the streets, caught between nostalgia and a competing sense of the present day, between Paris'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 in her journal pieces of the present, past, of art, philosophy, of herself, and of the world outside her.

Featuring a new introduction by Kate Zambreno.

Review Quotes

Praise for Gail Scott

"[Y]ou might want to live in Scott's sentences forever ... [to] read them again and again for the pleasure of pure description." --The Paris Review

"As probing as Gertrude Stein, as lusty as François Rabelais, as analytical as Luce Irigaray, Scott seems forever in motion." --The Believer

"Scott is one of the most gutsy writers around."--Globe & Mail

"[E]ssential reading for a generation whose life never quite matched the ideals that were promised to it." --The London Free Press

"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." --LA Review of Books

These were the shortest sentences I'd ever seen," Gladman writes, "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." --Renée Gladman

"I return to Scott's works again and again as a reminder that there is a necessary and ongoing relationship between art and politics and that the way we use language can work equally as hard to perpetuate or disrupt systems. We need more sentences, like Scott's, that look ahead instead of back, that tip us forward into vigilance, music, and flux." --Sarah Burgoyne

"Gail Scott has an extraordinary ability to compress scenic observations ... into short, jewel-like notations." --Hugh Hood

About the Author

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.