A new take on Latin American literature that analyzes secret police reports on writers and advances readings of their novels, short stories, and poems. It examines modernity, and the modern gaze, from the Italian Renaissance to the authoritarian regimes in Cold War Latin as the origins of today's surveillance society.

"This book is a cultural and aesthetic analysis of the complex relation between state police agencies and intellectuals and writers in Latin America during the Cold War. What did agents care about when they spied on writers and artists? Did state surveillance impact the creation of writers; and, if so, how? What did it mean to live and write in a society torn between anticommunist paranoia and revolutionary rhetoric?"--