My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973

Harry Mathews

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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.

Book Details

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publish Date: Jan 20th, 2015
Pages: 203
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.54in - 6.34in - 0.65in - 0.64lb
EAN: 9781564783929
Categories: • Thrillers - Espionage• Thrillers - General

About the Author

Mathews, Harry: - Born in New York in 1930, Harry Mathews settled in Europe in 1952 and has since then lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, recent publications are THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Editions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), OULIPO COMPENDIUM (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

Praise for this book

This is an honest account by someone (he seems at the time to have been a bit of a ne'er-do-well) who tried to play spy without knowing what the word meant and landed himself in boiling-hot water. The book, which is as exciting as any novel, proves a useful moral: leave this business to the pros. --Colonel Raymond Russell (ret.) Counterintelligence Corps, U.S. Army

"A taut manhunt." -- Guardian

"It's outrageous that an educated man and a gifted writer like Mr. Mathews could make such a public confession of such shameful activities."-Q. Kuhlmann, author of "The Eye of Anguish: Subversive Activity in the German Democratic Republic"

"So what you have at the end of the day is a book that's easy to like, an unusual pleasure: an American expatriate spy fantasy, and a very entertaining novel. Of course it is a novel. Right?"--New York Times

"A taut manhunt."--Guardian