F.B. Eyes

"Anyone who spies William J. Maxwell's latest book is sure to have her or his eyes pop. F.B. Eyes is a fascinating study of the FBI's decades-long surveillance program targeting the who's who of the African American cultural scene. What we read as art, Hoover's G-Men coded as threats. In poring over black writers' output across the long arc of the civil rights struggle, the FBI's 'ghostreaders, ' as diabolical as they were paranoid, added layers of weight to--and in some cases informed--the African American literary canon, which Maxwell reveals in an irresistible narrative steeped in investigative research."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University