"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.
