This investigation focuses on how the concept of failure works as a writing system in three cases of Latin American literary journals. Conceiving failure as a productive element, I focus on how this concept is articulated in the journals of Alejandra Pizarnik, Mario Levrero and Ricardo Piglia. I argue that, even though failure abounds in literary journals in different forms (failure to obtain literary recognition, failure in love relationships, failure to achieve economic and financial relief) these authors develop a rhetoric of failure that becomes a productive literary system in the form of the diary. In the Introduction I describe the contemporary critical scene in Latin America. In its plurality of forms, autobiographical discourses have become ubiquitous in our tradition. Diaries have not been the exception. I begin by describing what the main critics have expressed regarding what has been called the “literaturas del yo” and by stating the conceptual and formal differences between autobiographies and diaries. In chapter 1 I delve into the work of Mario Levrero and his “trilogía luminosa”––Diario de un canal (1987), El discurso vacío (1997), La novela luminosa (2005)––and argue that failure to comply with his original project of “Novela luminosa” has become a system in itself to produce three novelist works in the form of an allegedly “failing” diary. Chapter 2 focuses on Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diarios (2013). In this case, I read into how the poet develops a rhetoric of failure to build her literary persona as a “poeta maldita” and how this enables her to question, by becoming the most importat literary misfit of her time, the strict and oppressive gender distinctions thar kept women artists below the literary radar. I dedicate the third chapter to work on Ricardo Piglias trilogy Los diarios de Emilio Renzi (2015-2016-2018). In this case I work on Piglia’s strategy to turn his handwritten journals into fiction by “offering” them to his lifelong alter ego, Emilio Renzi, and thus turning Los diarios de Emilio Renzi into a failed diary.