We released the first in our MIT Press series, “Writers Under Surveillance,” two years ago today.

MuckRock is excited to announce that thanks to the generous support of MIT Press, JPat Brown and Beryl Lipton will be presenting a talk this weekend at the 2019 Oxford Literary Festival on our book, Writers under Surveillance: The FBI Files.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation files on James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Sontag, and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them. Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.

After a year of hard work, our first professionally published book, Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, is almost here! It’s set for release Sept. 18, from MIT Press, so we’re hosting an informal book launch party at The Field on 19th the in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After a little over two years of processing, the National Archives and Records Administration has released the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on the writer Dorothy Parker - the first time those files have been made public since the FBI removed them from their FOIA reading room over a decade ago.