Letras torcidas : La doble vida de Mariana Callejas: escritora y agente de Pinochet

During Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in the mid-1970s, young and prominent writers gathered to read and discuss short stories in a mansion in the foothills of the Andes near Santiago, Chile. What none of them knew was that, in that same place, where a couple lived with their young children, a secret headquarters operated, where crimes were carried out, chemical weapons were manufactured, and the most important international missions were planned for the regime's political police: the dangerous and fearsome National Intelligence Directorate. At the center of this double life was Mariana Callejas, hostess of the literary workshop, a talented and award-winning writer, and a magnetic figure who, while acting as a writer and homemaker, traveled the world carrying out extermination missions alongside her American husband, the agent Michael Townley. Thanks to rigorous research and a vibrant narrative style, the renowned Chilean chronicler Juan Cristóbal Peña reconstructs the intimate, familial, and public life of a woman who embodies one of the most unsettling paradoxes in Chile's recent history: the coexistence of literary sensibility and political violence in the service of the State. Based on testimonies, court documents, and in-depth interviews with the protagonist of this book, Crooked Letters reveals a world where culture and horror shared the same roof, and where memory still attempts to piece together the remnants of a disturbing life.