Beauty Salon

"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 Jos© 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 €œguests€ 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 M©dicis Prize for best novel translated into French. This is its first translation into English.