Beauty Salon

Mexican writer Mario Bellatin has published dozens of novels with major and minor publishing houses throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States, including The Large Glass 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.Shook's many translations include work by Mario Bellatin, Tedi López Mills, and Víctor Terán. Their collection of poetry, Our Obsidian Tongues, was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. They live in Los Angeles.

"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 Jose Saramago."—New York Times “What [the narrator] has given to [his patients], and Bellatin to us, is a model for dying, and for living; for treating the abject body with honesty and respect, despite its difference and decay—perhaps because of it.”—Maggie Riggs, Words Without Borders "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 "An unflinching allegory on death."—Publishers Weekly "When this disquieting novella appeared, Mexican (and even Latin American) literature changed." —Francisco Goldman