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Leave to Remain

Abigail Lang author Thalia Field author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press

Published:12th Mar '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Leave to Remain cover

"Leave to Remain is back-to-front suit, a cascading Escher staircase, a Jacob's Ladder toy. Field and Lang's hybrid essay/meditations bridge the gaps they create: fascinating, tricksy, eloquent, wistful, cosmic, joyous!"

Leave to Remain is a faux spy-novel possessed by the spirit of Janus: doubleness, duplicity, double-entendres, two-facedness, bridges and doorways—as is only appropriate for a work composed by two writers: one French, one American.

Two-faced Janus resurrects into a time-traveling adventure, a tour of double-agents, double-speak, and double-dealings. In their earlier hybrid essay, A Prank of Georges (2010), Thalia Field and Abigail Lang returned us to "the primal force of language: naming" (Susan Howe). In Leave to Remain, a weathered Janus pursues an elusive quest, responding to a world of war, traitors, translations, and the slippery personal and political terrain between friends and enemies.

This silly and deadly serious fiction-essay aims at nothing less than a full inquiry into how monstrous we are when we define loyalties and defend definitions, and how we are all double-agents seeking meaning and intelligence. Unafraid of being both timeless and timely, Leave to Remain challenges the reader to play in the world of folded imagery and language.

ISBN: 9781628972849

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

172 pages