Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2023
On Sale: October 10, 2023
320 pages ISBN: 0374293570 EAN: 9780374293574 Kindle: B0BQGDMFH6 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Long-listed for the National Book Award for
Fiction
A Most Anticipated
Read: The New York Times, The
Guardian, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Bay
Area Reporter, Datebook, Electric
Literature, The Stacks, Them, Publishers
Weekly
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, 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.
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