Amulet

“Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.” —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

“[Latin America’s] most vibrant expositor: an acid-tongued, truth-telling, peripatetic genius, who lived all too briefly, wrote in a fever and did not go gentle into that good night.” —Marie Arana, The Washington Post

Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of Mexican poetry. Uruguayan by birth, Mexican by destiny, the vagrant poetess serves as guardian, confidant, literary mentor, and occasional lover to a generation of Mexico City’s mad young poets, a fixture in their heady bohemian swirl. On the infamous day in 1968 when the army invades and occupies the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico to quash student protests, Auxilio is alone in the women’s bathroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfías on the toilet. Trapped yet defiant, she remains there for twelve days, her life’s story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge—and with it, a story of a lost generation, of literature, and of Latin America. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet is a spellbinding meditation on youth and valor, on violence and exile, on memory and history: a song of hope, and of love.