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, and thus a search for fellowship in solitude, as well as a testimony to the isolating effects and creative possibilities of the digital age. With reveries touching upon the insipid landscape of post-Cold War Poland, the elongated shadows of the Holocaust, and the narrator's "safe passage" to America, Permission not only updates the "epistolary novel" for our time by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens up a new literary frontier.