Cutting One's Hair

An impeccable collection of stories united by acceptance in the face of the loss of something essential

A man forever accompanied by a swarm of bees; a young woman who runs away from home to live among the Sioux; a mother who refuses to dispose of her son’s body; a boy who falls in love with someone who draws far too much attention. Intersecting characters whose secrets give meaning to their own lives and to those of the people around them. 

Suspended between the real and the symbolic, the stories in Cutting One’s Hair form an intimate ritual of loss—of innocence, of others, of the body, of the self—in which death sometimes appears as something domestic and acceptable, and at other times as something that can only be told through extraordinary beings: vampires, ghosts, wolf-women, or creatures with impossible hair. In every case, these stories affirm that every farewell is also a beginning. 

Winner of the 2023 Biblioteca Breve Prize for Physical Education, Rosario Villajos turns the writing of this book into an act of revelation and survival, allowing the nuances of autobiographical truth to slip through, only to cloak them in a fantastical mantle before the mixture is devoured and transformed into memory.