Leave to Remain
Legend of Janus
Publication | Critiques
Résumé
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. 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 friend and enemies. This silly and deadly serious fiction 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 meaningful and intelligence.
Thalia Field has published three collections with New Directions Press, most recently Bird Lovers, Backyard, as well as a performance novel with Coffee House. Her most recent novel, Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction), was published by Solid Objects. Leave to Remain is her second collaboration with Abigail Lang, following A Prank of Georges, published by Essay Press.
Abigail Lang teaches American Literature and Translation at Université Paris-Diderot and is a member of the Double Change collective, which promotes exchanges between US and French poetry. She has translated many modern and contemporary poets into French, from Antin to Zukofsky.
Critiques
- “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK - “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course