
Blackouts
A Novel
by Justin Torres
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Pub Date Oct 10 2023 | Archive Date Nov 30 2023
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Description
Winner of the National Book Award
Winner of the California Book Award
Winner of Tournament of Books
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.
A Note From the Publisher2>
Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.
Advance Praise
“Blackouts is a historic feat of literature. I’ve never read a book so brilliantly inventive. ‘Must-read’ and ‘masterpiece’ don’t do the book justice. A marvel of the human mind.” —Javier Zamora, author of Solito
“Erotic and beguiling, Blackouts prowls the negative spaces that surround our identities, our memories, and our desires, inviting us to think about erasure and collage not just as literary techniques, but as psychological processes, and even as radical acts of cultural and sexual reframing. An intelligent, loving, and genuinely subversive work.” —Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
“Blackouts gives me what I read fiction for, what I read for at all—the sense of a brilliant mind creating a puzzle in the air in front of me, all intelligence and surprises. Ambitious, disarming, full of a kind of daring that winks as it passes—as if David Wojnarowicz rewrote Nabokov’s Pale Fire and then left it for years in an abandoned building, just for you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Justin Torres is a master of the urgent, surprising sentence. In Blackouts, he pays close attention to every word, crafting a narrative that is as much about what is on the page as what has been painstakingly cut away. This novel is a stunning achievement of re-creation, imagination, and tender, tender care. Read it and feel held.” —Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House
“It’s coming. It’s coming. Ring the church bells. Alert the media. The amazing Justin Torres has a new book. We the Animals, his first novel, was so incredible, so impeccably fabulous, that I began a ritual of rereading it every few years, and after every reread I wondered when Torres, one of our great writers, would come out with a second. The wait is over. It’s coming. Gird your loins. I shiver with anticipation.” —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope
“Blackouts is unequivocally brilliant, bold, and structurally inventive. Like its absorbing narrator, who tells stories to keep his friend alive, Justin Torres has written a shamelessly vital novel that reminds us all not to give up on ourselves, on one another, or on our stories.” —Angie Cruz, author of How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
“I’m crushed out on Justin Torres’s writing: charming, sexy, soft, and full of truth. His words cut like Cupid’s arrow.” —Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends
“Enigmatic, spine-tingling, imbued with inky atmosphere and radiant disclosures—a book like a magic trick.” —Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
“Blackouts is a beautiful collage of a novel. Throughout, Justin Torres quenches a thirst one scene, one flashback, one image at a time.” —Alejandro Varela, author of The People Who Report More Stress
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9780374293574 |
PRICE | $30.00 (USD) |
PAGES | 304 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 76 members
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