LeavetoRemain Format: Paperback

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.

Thalia Field is the author of Point and Line, Incarnate: Story Material, ULULU, Bird Loves, Backyard, and, with Abigail Lang, A Prank of Georges. She teaches in the Literary Arts department of Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Abigail Lang is the author of Le monde compte rendu: Lectures de Louis Zukofsky and the co-editor of Double Change, A Film Archive of Poetry, 1 and 2. She also translates American poetry into French and teaches at the University of Paris–Diderot.