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6 books match the query 'Spy'

cover of A Spy in the Enemy's Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature

A Spy in the Enemy's Country

The Emergence of Modern Black Literature

Donald A. Petesch

University of Iowa Press, 1991

This dynamic study provides a rich intellectual and historical background for understanding the works of black American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with a look at early slave narratives, Donald Petesch examines how these writings reflect the conditions imposed upon their authors and goes on to explore the shifting and often contradictory black/white consciousness that was emerging in the twentieth century. Moving into the Harlem Renaissance, Petesch considers the implications of the historical and social contexts for a number of black authors.
This closely focused look at a group of writers who represent both the emergence of modern black literature and the Harlem Renaissance, coupled with the keen examination of the historical and social conditions that shaped them, will be valuable reading for all students of black literature and history, intellectual history, and popular culture.
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cover of A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories

A Spy in the House of Loud

New York Songs and Stories

By Chris Stamey

University of Texas Press, 2018

Popular music was in a creative upheaval in the late 1970s. As the singer-songwriter and producer Chris Stamey remembers, “the old guard had become bloated, cartoonish, and widely co-opted by a search for maximum corporate profits, and we wanted none of it.” In A Spy in the House of Loud, he takes us back to the auteur explosion happening in New York clubs such as the Bowery’s CBGB as Television, Talking Heads, R.E.M., and other innovative bands were rewriting the rules. Just twenty-two years old and newly arrived from North Carolina, Stamey immersed himself in the action, playing a year with Alex Chilton before forming the dB’s and recording the albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion, which still have an enthusiastic following.

A Spy in the House of Loud vividly captures the energy that drove the music scene as arena rock gave way to punk and other new streams of electric music. Stamey tells engrossing backstories about creating in the recording studio, describing both the inspiration and the harmonic decisions behind many of his compositions, as well as providing insights into other people’s music and the process of songwriting. Photos, mixer-channel and track assignment notes, and other inside-the-studio materials illustrate the stories. Revealing another side of the CBGB era, which has been stereotyped as punk rock, safety pins, and provocation, A Spy in the House of Loud portrays a southern artist’s coming-of-age in New York’s frontier abandon as he searches for new ways to break the rules and make some noise.

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cover of A Spy in the House of Love

A Spy in the House of Love

Anaïs Nin

Ohio University Press, 2014

Although Anaïs Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to literary fiction, transforming her private writings into artfully crafted novels that explore female desire, identity, and emotional complexity.

A Spy in the House of Love is a classic of psychological and women’s fiction, centered on Sabina, a woman torn between her longing for artistic freedom, romantic adventure, and sensual fulfillment, and the social expectations that constrain her. Moving through a bohemian, Parisian-inspired world, Sabina navigates multiple relationships in her search for passion, meaning, and self-understanding.

Written at a time when Nin’s own life was shaped by conflicting loyalties and intense relationships, the novel offers a deeply introspective exploration of love, infidelity, erotic longing, and self-discovery. As Sabina confronts her inner divisions, she asks a timeless question: can one indulge the fantasies and restless pursuit of desire without facing profound emotional consequences?

A landmark of modernist literature and feminist writing, A Spy in the House of Love remains a powerful, evocative portrait of a woman’s inner life—ideal for readers of classic literary fiction, experimental narrative, and character-driven novels about relationships and desire.

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cover of Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy: A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution

Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy

A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution

John A. Nagy

Westholme Publishing, 2013

Newly Discovered Evidence Against a Man Who Has Long Been Suspected as Being a British Agent and America’s First Traitor 
“John Nagy has devoted his astonishing research skills to unearthing the truth about the least known and most dangerous spy in American history.”—Thomas Fleming, author of Liberty! The American Revolution
Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr. (1734–1778) was a respected medical man and civic leader in colonial Boston who was accused of being an agent for the British in the 1770s, providing compromising intelligence about the plans of the provincial leadership in Massachusetts as well as important information from the meetings of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Despite his eminence as a surgeon—he conducted an autopsy on one of the victims of the Boston Massacre—and his own correspondence and the numbers of references to him from contemporaries, no known image of him exists and many aspects of his life remain obscure. What we do know is that George Washington accused him of being a traitor to the colonial cause and had him arrested and tried; after first being jailed in Connecticut and then Massachusetts, during which he continued to profess his innocence, he was allowed to leave America on a British vessel in 1778, but it foundered in the Atlantic with all hands lost. The question of whether Dr. Benjamin Church was working for the British has never been conclusively demonstrated, and remains among the mysteries of the American Revolution.
In Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy: A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution, noted authority John A. Nagy has scoured original documents to establish the best case against Church, identifying previously unacknowledged correspondence and reports as containing references to the doctor and his activities, and noting an incriminating letter in the possession of the Library of Congress that is a coded communication composed by Church to his British contact. Nagy shows that at the cusp of the revolution, when the possibility—let alone the outcome—of an American colonial rebellion was far from assured, Church sought to align himself with the side he thought would emerge victorious—the British crown—and thus line his pockets with money that he desperately needed. A fascinating investigation into a centuries-old intrigue, this well-researched volume is an important contribution to American Revolution scholarship.
 
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cover of My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File

My Life as a Spy

Investigations in a Secret Police File

Katherine Verdery

Duke University Press, 2018

As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.
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cover of To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

To Kill a Spy

Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

Zachary Mazur

Central European University Press, 2026

On an August afternoon in 1910, a Polish nationalist gunned down an alleged Russian spy on the streets of Kraków. Afterward the murderer claimed that he had done a great deed for “Poland,” though no such country existed at the time. The press lionized the assassin, justifying his act as necessary for the defense of the nation. When the defendant stood trial, a jury composed of local citizens acquitted him, and he walked free.
How does an ordinary, working-class man transform into a political executioner? And how does a society reach the tipping point where premeditated murder is celebrated as a civic duty?
This gripping historical investigation unravels the environment and conditions of radicalization in fin-de-siècle Europe. Societal shifts, mass political movements, the popular press and espionage paranoia all contributed to a fearful community, wary of outsiders and ready to do anything to defend itself.
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