Margot Singer, award-winning author and professor of creative writing at Denison University, has published a new collection of personal essays, Secret Agent Man (Barrow Street Press, June 2025). This book offers a profound exploration of memory and loss, obscurity and clarity, the search for identity, and the meaning of home.
The nine essays collected in Secret Agent Man probe the complexities of time, history, and the elusive nature of personal identity. The title essay, a poignant reflection on her father’s mysterious past and potential involvement in espionage, challenges perceptions of familial roles and the narratives we construct about our loved ones.
Secret Agent Man has earned praise from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, among others.
“Singer…delivers an evocative collection of personal essays focused on themes of trust and deception… With a gossamer touch, Singer thoroughly probes the boundaries between truth and fiction. The results are haunting.” — Publishers Weekly
“This striking collection features essays that grapple with conflicts of perception and truth. Shifting through moments in Singer’s life, the nine essays delve into the complexities of coming into one’s own alongside the blurs — and illusions — of memory. Singer’s richly textured essays eloquently capture life’s weighty pulls.” — Leah Strauss for Booklist
Secret Agent Man follows Singer’s critically acclaimed novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House), which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and was shortlisted for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her collection of linked short stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press), won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Reform Judaism Prize. She has also received the Glasgow Prize, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, as well as grants from the NEA and the Ohio Arts Council.