Consisting of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, <em>Permission</em> 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, <em>Permission</em> 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.