The Large Glass by Mario Bellatin

In The Large Glass, celebrated Mexican innovator Mario Bellatin now examines his most complicated subject: himself. Featuring three different autobiographies, The Large Glass challenges the absurd and hubristic project of the autobiography itself—how can any writer account for himself in a way that is dignified yet honest? Intimate yet public? Like the Duchamp sculpture from which it takes its name, Mario Bellatin’s The Large Glass deconstructs the very form it embraces, revealing the artifice of the autobiographical genre, while cleverly celebrating the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves.


Mexican writer Mario Bellatin has published dozens of novels with major and minor publishing houses throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States, including Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction and Jacob the Mutant, both from Phoneme Media. A practicing Sufi, Bellatin has won many international prizes, including, most recently, Cuba’s 2015 José María Arguedas Prize. He lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

“Mario Bellatin, who has the fortune or misfortune of being considered Mexican by the Mexicans and Peruvian by the Peruvians [is one of the] writers without whom there’s no understanding of this entelechy that we call new Latin American literature.” — Roberto Bolaño