It is commonly held among scholars that there was no mass literature in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. What should we do, then, with Lev Ovalov's Major Pronin or with the stories of Lev Sheinin, which began to appear in the mid-1930s? And what about Nikolai Shpanov's post-war best-sellers? As The Soviet Spy Thriller demonstrates, the Soviet authorities did not like to admit that they published low-quality literature aimed at the uncultured masses, but they greatly valued its propaganda value. These works represented a break with the 'Red Pinkerton' tradition of the 1920s: the genre was being reinvented along new lines, with a new seriousness, and documentary pretensions. The building of a new kind of spy thriller also required a new enemy. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, the Soviet spy thriller reflects the shift from an obsession with class to a new preoccupation with nationality, as the Soviet Union constructed a new identity for itself in a rapidly changing world. The same identity discourse underwent another transformation in the post-Stalin years, when the Soviet agent, underground in the enemy camp, became a metaphor for double life of the 'Soviet man'. A landmark new survey of a genre little known in the West, The Soviet Spy Thriller shines new light on cultural politics in the Soviet Union, and offers a fascinating counterpoint to the Western spy thrillers that will be so familiar to most readers.

Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France analyzes pairs of women writing in French. Through examining pairs of writers, ranging from Colette and Anne de Pene to Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbar, Katharine Ann Jensen assesses how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women's relationships, the author combines close readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.

"Compressed Utterances brings focused attention to collage in a Germanic context, whose contours and impact are still so little appreciated. As this stunning volume shows, collage serves as a key medium not only for understanding art historical developments but social and political transformations as well, often embodying the dynamic forces of avant-garde criticality." (Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts) "A deep dive into the paradigmatic medium of the twentieth century, Compressed Utterances is the foundational text of the growing field of collage studies. The book's established and emerging authors investigate an astonishing range of previously unknown collage work to explore German artists' and writers' deployment of this medium as appropriative, intertextual, alienating, and temporally slippery." (Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York) Composite pictures create narratives and images from many fragments. They turn often disparate and juxtaposing images and text into a singular image or message. Collage makes from the broken and, arguably, no other country has reflected the fractious nature of its history more than Germany. The collage form is one of the best expressive forms to be taken up and experimented with by German artists since 1912. Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context after 1912 brings together essays by scholars, students and curators to examine the use of collage by German-speaking artists, making in their homeland and abroad, whose works are closely connected to the tumultuous histories of Germany and neighbouring German-speaking nations since 1912 to the late 2000s.