"Like much of Mr. Bellatin’s work, Beauty Salon is pithy, allegorical and profoundly disturbing, with a plot that evokes The Plague by Camus or Blindness by José Saramago."--New York Times
"Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets."--Booklist
A strange plague appears in a large city. Rejected by family and friends, some of the sick have nowhere to finish out their days until a hair stylist decides to offer refuge. He ends up converting his beauty shop, which he’s filled with tanks of exotic fish, into a sort of medieval hospice. As his “guests” continue to arrive and to die, his isolation becomes more and more complete in this dream-hazy parable by one of Mexico’s cutting-edge literary stars.
Mario Bellatin, the author of numerous short novels, was born in Mexico City in 1960. In 2000, Beauty Salon was nominated for the Médicis Prize for best novel translated into French. This is its first translation into English.

Beauty Salon

Literature & Fiction

Bellatín, Mario

United States

City Lights Publishers

From the groundbreaking author of Beauty Salon, The Large Glass, Jacob the Mutant, Mario Bellatin delivers a rousing, allegorical novel following the widowed keeper of a mysterious garden. When art student Izu’s teacher asks her to visit the famous collection of Mr. Murakami, she publishes a firm rebuttal to his curation. Instead of responding with fury, the rich man pursues her hand in marriage.\nWhen we meet her in the opening pages, Mrs. Murakami is watching the demolition of her now-dead husband’s most prized part of the estate: his garden. The novel that follows takes place in a strange, not-quite-real Japan of the author’s imagination. But who, in fact, holds the role of author? As Mr. Murakami’s garden is demolished, so too is the narrative’s authenticity, leaving the reader to wonder: did this book’s creator exist at all?\nMario Bellatin has revolutionized the state of Latin American literature with his experimental, shocking novels. With this brand-new, highly anticipated edition of Mrs. Murakami's Garden from lauded translator Heather Cleary, readers have access to a playful modern classic that transcends reality.

Mrs. Murakami's Garden

Literary

Deep Vellum Publishing

Mario Bellatin’s complex dreamscape, offered here in a brand-new translation, presents a timely allegorical portrait of the body and society in decay, victim to inscrutable pandemic. 
In a large, unnamed city, a strange, highly infectious disease begins to spread, afflicting its victims with an excruciating descent toward death, particularly unsparing in its assault of those on society's margins. Spurned by their loved ones and denied treatment by hospitals, the sick are left to die on the streets until a beauty salon owner, whose previous caretaking experience extended only to the exotic fish tanks scattered among his workstations, opens his doors as a refuge. In the ramshackle Morgue, victim to persecution and violence, he accompanies his male guests as they suffer through the lifeless anticipation of certain death, eventually leaving the wistful narrator in complete, ill-fated isolation.

Perpetual Law

Fiction. Translated from the Spanish by David Shook. In his autobiographies, celebrated Mexican innovator Mario Bellatín recounts his childhood as a bathhouse spectacle, the treatment of an illness suffered by his Sufi spiritual mentor, and his complicated search for a quality second-hand Renault 5. Like the Duchamp sculpture from which it takes its name, Mario Bellatín's THE LARGE GLASS deconstructs the very form it embraces, revealing the artifice of the autobiographical form as well as the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves.

The Large Glass

Eyewear Publishing

Janelle Lynch (born 1969) explores themes of death, regeneration and preservation. Los Jardines de Mexico unites four series of photographs taken between 2002 and 2007, three from Mexico City and one from Chiapas. Simultaneously celebratory and sad, the photographs embrace loss as a necessary facilitator of growth.

Janelle Lynch: Los Jardines de Mexico

Arts & Photography

Aldrete-Haas, José

Photography & Video

Radius Books

Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin introduces the revolutionary work of a mysterious Japanese writer whose very existence has been all but erased from world literature. A writer who inspired Juan Rulfo and José María Arguedas, Shiki Nagaoka’s work has never been available in English, and his most famous novel, which still hasn’t been entirely deciphered, is written in an untranslatable language. Bellatin refuses to allow his portrait of the writer to end with the deformedly large nose that determined his life path, by offering a thorough analysis of the writer’s innovative use of photography and translation as integral processes in the production of his texts.

Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction

Phoneme Media

Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Mario Bellatin’s Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely, while the novella mutates into another story. Cleverly translated by Jacob Steinberg, this Phoneme Media edition of a new novel by one of Mexico’s most notorious and celebrated writers includes a translator’s afterword and explanatory maps by illustrator Zsu Szkurka.

Jacob the Mutant

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.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bellatín, Mario. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bellatín, Mario

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bellatín, Mario. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beauty Salon

Mrs. Murakami's Garden

Beauty Salon

Perpetual Law

The Large Glass

Janelle Lynch: Los Jardines de Mexico

Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction

Jacob the Mutant

The Large Glass

Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction