Perpetual Law

“Hilarious and gut-wrenching in equal measure, this wondrous experiment is not to be missed.” —Starred review, Publishers Weekly

“Mario Bellatin [is one of the] writers without whom there’s no understanding of this entelechy that we call new Latin American literature.” —Roberto Bolaño

“Bellatin’s extraordinary use of intertextuality and metatextuality draws attention to itself; it is as if his stories were as incomplete as his own body, as his alter egos walking around in his fictional worlds.” —Jeffrey Zuckerman, Los Angeles Review of Books

“In a score of novellas written since 1985, [Bellatin] has not only toyed with the expectations of readers and critics but also bent language, plot, and structure to suit his own mysterious purposes, in ways often as unsettling as they are baffling.” —The New York Times

“One of Mexico’s best-known novelists . . . Bellatin is usually included in a group of post-boom Latin American writers, such as the Chilean Roberto Bolaño and the Argentine César Aira, who have introduced innovations not only in the style of their prose but in the way they think about literature. In Bellatin’s stories, the line between reality and fiction is blurry; the author himself frequently appears as a character. His books are fragmentary, their atmospheres bizarre, even disturbing. They are full of mutations, fluid sexual identities, mysterious diseases, deformities.” —The New Yorker

“If literature aims to make us less alone, we need writers like Bellatin who reflect not just a different perspective on life, but can envision something separate and apart, a periscope rising above the self.” —Matt Bucher, Electric Literature

“Bellatin offers a different way of reading, and of telling, a story—one in which what is unsaid, incompletely rendered, allows respectful room for discovering and conveying more than we might have imagined, or were told that we could.” —Words Without Borders