Beauty Salon

By Mario Bellatin

Subjects: LGBTQ HIV/AIDS, AIDS (Disease), Gay men, Salones de belleza, Stonewall Book Awards, Diseases, Fiction, Ficción, LGBTQ novels, Peruvian Mexicans, Mexican fiction, Peluqueros, Beauty shops, Epidemics, Plague, Fiction, general, Epidemias

Description: 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.