Blackouts by Justin Torres

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost
histories - personal and collective.
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 - has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired
by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns,
which contains stories 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. As Juan waits for his end, he
and the narrator trade stories - moments of joy and oblivion - and resurrect
lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside
us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Paramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the
book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many
more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres'sBlackouts is a work of
fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An
extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and
steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made - a world
full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.
Blackouts gives me what I read fiction for, what I read for at (...)

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 inThe
New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post . He lives
in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Oct 10/23
6.12 x 9.25 • 336 pages
61 Images Throughout; Printed Endpapers / Notes
9780374293574 • $36.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Fiction / Literary