New York, NY: Picador (January 7, 2025)

Paperback.

New.

“An enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City.” —Francisco Goldman

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 military invades the campus of the city’s main university, Auxilio is in the women’s bathroom of the department of literature and philosophy, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfias on the toilet. Trapped and alone, she hides there for twelve days, her life’s story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Amulet is a haunting, spellbinding meditation on violence and exile, on memory and history—a requiem for a lost generation.

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) was the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666, among many other notable works. Born in Santiago, Chile, he later lived in Mexico City, Paris, and Barcelona. His accolades include the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He died at the age of fifty and is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation.

Chris Andrews has translated books of prose fiction by César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, Liliana Colanzi, and Ágota Kristóf, among others. He is also the author of How to Do Things with Forms and The Oblong Plot.