"In Augustino, Marie-Claire Blais delivers a timely, and unsettling new installment in her ongoing portrait of North American life." "Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set in a post-September 11 world, on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich and the poor, the powerful and the humble, artists and criminals, young, middle-aged, and old. Marie-Claire Blais brilliantly shows in one flashing stroke the teeming lives and uncensored thoughts of men and women; victims and tormentors; kamikaze pilots and petty thieves; Marie Curie sacrificing herself to her thirst for knowledge; Our Lady of the Bags announcing the end of the world; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Petites Cendres, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer who senses the destructive forces at work in the heart of his everyday life. These individual destinies combine in Blais' vision to form a single, harmonic texture, capturing the troubled spirit of our disjointed age."--Jacket.