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Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part.
My Life in CIA documents Mathews's experiences as a would-be spy during 1973, where amid charged world events--the coup in Chile, Watergate, the ending of the Vietnam War--he found himself engaged in a game that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies decided he was a presence that should be eliminated.
Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a spellbinding thriller where the line between fact and fiction gets relentlessly blurred.
Harry Mathews
Harry Mathews was born in New York City in 1930 and spent his adult life in the United States and in France, where he co-founded the influential journal Locus Solus with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler in 1961. He was the first American member of the literary consortium Oulipo, alongside Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. His many writings, spanning novels, short fiction, poems, essays, and translations from the French, include The Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Cigarettes, The Journalist, My Life in CIA, and The Solitary Twin. Mathews was honored by the French government as an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in Key West, Florida, in 2017.
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