<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Beauty Salon</TitleText>

City Lights Books onix@onixsuite.com 20130217 eng

GCDS-9780872864733 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100827790 02 0872864731 03 9780872864733 15 9780872864733 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Beauty Salon</TitleText> 1 A01 Bellatin, Mario Mario Bellatin Mario Bellatín was born in Mexico City in 1960 and studied film in Cuba. From there he moved to Peru where his literary work was introduced and began to gain fame, and various of his works were brought to the screen. After returning to Mexico, he received high praise in his own country as well, homages to his talent as a singular and risk-taking storyteller. He is the author of the short novels Mujeres de Sal, Canon Perpetuo, Efecto Invernadero, Damas Chinas, and Poeta Ciego. Salon de Belleza (Beauty Shop) was released in 1999 and received huge praise and wide recognition. In 2009, City Lights published the first English translation of Beauty Salon to major acclaim, helping to establish broad recognition of his writing in the U.S.: "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 2 B06 Hollander, Kurt Kurt Hollander Kurt Hollander is a writer, editor, screenwriter, critic, photographer, and translator. Born in New York City, he has edited the magazinesThe Portable Lower East Side and Poliester, and directed and produced the feature film Carambola (2005). He currently writes for the London Guardian Weekly and the New York Times travel section. 01 eng 72 20 fiction; Mexico 01 Beauty Salon has been given a 2010 Stonewall Book Honor for the Barbara Gittings Literature Award. <a target="blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/books/10bellatin.html?ref=books"></a>From the publisher: "Ever on the lookout for interesting new writing from Latin America, especially Mexico, I always pay close attention when my Spanish-speaking friends begin to talk excitedly about what they're reading. Mario Bellatin's name came up in so many conversations that I knew I had to take a look..." Read more and join the conversation under reader reviews. A mysterious and deadly plague suddenly appears among the inhabitants of an unnamed city. Shunned by family and friends, some of the afflicted have nowhere to finish out their days until a lone hair stylist decides to convert his "Salon to the Stars" into a refuge for the dying. A connoisseur of exotic fish whose many aquariums adorn the salon, he creates a kind of medieval hospice. Time passes, his "guests" continue to arrive and die, and his isolation becomes more and more complete. All the while, the multicolored fish bear silent witness to his almost saintly dedication. Without medicines, pity or moralizing, he dispenses care until he meets his own end, in this dream-like parable from one of Mexico's cutting-edge literary stars. Praise for Beauty Salon:"When this disquieting novella appeared, told in a spare poetic language that seemed at once familiar and hauntingly strange, Mexican (and even Latin American) literature changed. Many readers sensed that here, at last, was a writer who truly spoke for them, of their secrets and secret selves and submerged dreams, in a voice they hadn't realized could actually find expression, much less appear in a book. Since then Mario Bellatin's influence and prestige have grown with each subsequent book, all of them marvels, like gifts from the future." -Francisco GoldmanPraise for Mario Bellatín:"Mario Bellatín has indisputably become one of the literary stars of the Latin American scene." -"Radar Libros," Argentina "One of the most original figures of recent Latin American fiction." -ABC, Spain"Bellatín's unusual narrative world doesn't need to exceed the conventional limits of the short novel in order to take possession of mind of the reader, who's left seduced by the turbid and convulsive beauty of his stories." -El País, Spain"Bellatín is fundamentally a skeptic and, like David Lynch, he's most comfortable showing us images as fixed and isolated moments. Under his focus, and maybe in spite of it, I saw faces adopting strangely discordant and beautiful forms." -New Pages Book Review   02 Biting social allegory from one of Mexico's most exciting young authors: edgy, lyrical and cynically hopeful. 08 "In the Terminal, like the flashy fish that inhabit the aquariums, and the terminally ill that die around them, everything floats. There are no turns of the heart, or sudden twists. We drift through the inevitable. If poetry is making nothing happen, as Auden once said, than this novel shows that prose can as well." -Jesse Tangen-Mills Bookslut 08 "Although pithy in size (a mere 63 pages), its subject matter is decidedly not: a mysterious and deadly plague has descended upon an unnamed city, whose infected inhabitants come to the Terminal, a former beauty salon, 'where people who have nowhere to die end their days'. . . . Originally published in 1999 but recently translated from the Spanish by Kurt Hollander, I feel this disquieting novella is destined to haunt-and ultimately inspire-any reader who dares allow himself to reflect upon its deeper lessons." -Adrienne Biggs NCBPMA 08 "[This] strange and beautiful parable about human bodies living and dying on the fringes of society . . . prompts us to consider our collective attitudes toward, and treatment of, the human body - in illness, in death, in poverty, and in opposition to dominant conceptions of sexual behavior. . . . [Bellatin provides] 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 08 "In a sparse style, the short novel Beauty Salon . . . relates the story of a mysterious illness that plagues an unidentified city. . . . The seemingly simple tale offers a complex network of motifs, symbols and paradoxes. The aquariums that adorn the beauty salon, for instance, become the barometer of the advancing plague: like the 'strong young men who had once been beauty queens and then disappear with their bodies destroyed,' the beautiful fish die in the aquariums and are flushed down the toilet. Similarly, once he contracts the plague, the narrator asserts: 'I feel like a fish covered in fungus from whom even its natural predators will flee.' . . . Despite its brevity, Beauty Salon stands to linger in the aquariums of our memories, at times, like the monstrous axolotls, revealing the ugliness of the world, at others, like the mystic golden carp, providing hope for a better tomorrow." -Eduardo Febles The Gay and Lesbian Review 08 "That questions about gender can be gorgeously rendered in such a short work so obsessed with death speaks of Bellatin's mastery of the form, and we're left to grumble about the paltry amount of fiction translated into English (translations of three of his stories were included in Chinese Checkers, released by Ravenna Press only in 2007). Thanks to his 'unusual' personality, though, Bellatin was featured in the New York Times. Score one for non-English-language lit?" -Alicia Kennedy Alicia Kennedy 08 "Bellatin's fiction is very fresh and invigorating ... With his pared down style and conscious experimentation in prose, Bellatin shows an affinity to the Nouveau Roman and its focus on objects rather than the traditional elements of the novel. Bellatin seeks to portray fragments of experience rather than a coherent world. Characters aren't defined by descriptions, but remain only as emotionally-charged glimmers in the narrator's memory. ... The effect of this is disconcerting and strangely moving ... " -Eric Karl Anderson Chroma 08 "Imagine a salon that becomes 'the Terminal,' a surreal yet all too real refuge for strangers 'who have nowhere else to die.' I'm still haunted by the narrative voice and the aquariums. (You'll have to read it to find out about them.)" - Robert Gray Shelf Awareness 08 "Mexican writer Mario Bellatin has created a rare literary feat: in just 63 pages he has produced a novella that sparkles with beauty and clarity as it delves into one of the most horrifying and shunned diseases of our times-AIDS. . . . Written in simple sentences that flow offortlessly without the interruptions of chapters, Beauty Salon is a lyrical piece about how a disease is turning its victims into pariahs, and as a result has made our society less human. Mario Bellatin had the courage to write about this taboo in a country that is known for its homophobia, and in return he was rewarded with a little book of deep beauty." -David D. Medina Literal. Latin American Voices 08 "The first of his works to be translated, a collection of three novellas called 'Chinese Checkers,' appeared only within the last couple of years, and 'Beauty Salon,' a novella from 1994, is to be published by City Lights Books this week. 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. In an unnamed city that is suffering from an unnamed epidemic a transvestite hairdresser has turned his shop into a hospice for men dying of the disease, caring for them as indifferently as he tends to the fish he houses in aquariums that are his sole diversion. Many of Mr. Bellatin's novels, 'Beauty Salon' and 'Shiki Nagaoka' included, focus on characters whose bodies are deformed, disfigured or diseased or whose sexual identity is uncertain or fluid. That is one reason Ms. Palaversich, who wrote the introduction to a recent Spanish-language compendium of Mr. Bellatin's work, compares him not to other Latin American writers but to filmmakers like David Cronenberg and David Lynch and painters like Frida Kahlo." -Larry Rohter New York Times 08 "The bleak, rapid-fire sentences of Mexican writer Mario Bellatín's Beauty Salon give the spare novella an airless hyper-immediacy-and a terrible, unstoppable momentum. . . . Bellatín's tale exists outside an ethical conversation. Rather than pose moralistic questions, he sets about elegantly illuminating the book's epigraph, a quotation from the equally efficient Yasunari Kawabata: 'Anything inhumane becomes human over time.'  In a few haunting pages, Bellatín makes this piercingly clear." -Megan Doll Bookforum 08 "Reading Beauty Salon one is very much in the presence of a man who knows what he believes and tries to consciously put that forth to the reader, and trying to work out just what this is-and why he believe this-constitutes the book's primary interest . . . Beauty Salon is, like the fish tanks described within, a small, closed environment, although the paths that can be taken through it are many."-Scott Esposito Conversational Reading 08 "Some authors take time creating an overall feel for their book. But when you're writing a novella of well under 100 pages, you don't have much time to set the tone. Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin doesn't waste any establishing the tenor of Beauty Salon. He does it with the first two sentences: 'A few years ago my interest in aquariums led me to decorate by beauty salon with colored fish. Now that the salon has become the Terminal, where people who have nowhere to die end their days, it's been very hard on me to see the fish disappear.' . . . Bellatin's description of the world is blunt and brutal." *blogcritics 08 "Beauty Salon succeeds in suggesting whole worlds just outside of its pages. The effect is distinctly cinematic: a montage of images which catch the reader's eye and expand the reality of this anonymous man, anonymous disease, and anonymous city far beyond the story itself."-Larissa Kyzer Three Percent 08 "In his first work translated into English, Mexican short-novelist Bellatin presents the testimony of a hairstylist who turns his successful big-city salon into a refuge for men dying of an incurable disease. . . .  Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets." -- Ray Olson Booklist 08 "Beauty Salon, by Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, originally published in Spanish in 1999 and now out from City Lights Books in a translation by Kurt Hollander, is short. A mere 63 pages, which is good, because its density requires multiple re-reads-and in that curious inversion of fiction, the less the author says, the more expansive the story's meaning becomes. . . His book itself is a place-contained and at times claustrophobic-like the beauty salon refuge, like the suffocating aquariums. And in it, despite its spare style, lives a dense story that leaves a reader unsettled, and unsettlingly intrigued."-Shawna Yang Ryan The Rumpus 08 "An extremely slender, sad tale by Bellatín recounts a gay man's reflections on the waning days of sexual excess and the specter of death wrought by AIDS, though here AIDS is a mysterious, nameless plague. Formerly a stylist in a beauty salon in an unnamed city, the narrator, a transvestite, has now transformed the salon into the Terminal, 'where people who have nowhere to die end their days.' The Terminal has become a kind of hospice for dying gay men, the hair dryers and armchairs sold to buy cots and a cooker, the mirrors removed to avoid 'multiplying the suffering.' The manager keeps exotic fish in aquariums, which he keenly observes as an allegory of what's happening in the larger world: as symptoms of the sickness become apparent on his own body, he notices a fungus growing on the angelfish that fatally infects the others. The narrator's brutal reasoning renders Bellatín's tale an unflinching allegory on death." Publisher's Weekly 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100827790/extras/The_City_Lights_No_Contest.pdf 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100827790/extras/979B4E4B-E569-661E-6D56C77707984739.html 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100827790/extras/BeautySalonExcerptCL.pdf 04 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100827790/images/87286100827790L.gif 07 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100827790/images/87286100827790S.gif http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100827790 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20090720 08 8 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20090720 01 02 10.95 USD