“For several months this year, Mario Bellatin, one of Mexico’s best-known novelists, waged a quixotic war against Grupo Planeta, the largest publishing group in the Spanish-language world. An eccentric public figure who wears a variety of striking, artist-designed prostheses in lieu of his missing right forearm, Bellatin had an unwavering demand: that Planeta unpublish his magnum opus, Salón de Belleza.”