Blackouts

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
ERIC'S NOVEMBER BOOK CLUB SELECTION.

A dozen years in the making, this book is a gripping, mystical exploration of storytelling, art, love, and queer legacies. It’s a finalist for the National Book Award and has been named a must-read in every review, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m thrilled to announce that my November book club pick is... Blackouts, by Justin Torres.

Trying to understand the blackouts he’s experiencing, our unnamed narrator arrives in the desert in search of Juan Gay, a queer elder whom he met in a mental hospital a decade before. Juan is dying, and his final request is for the narrator to finish his “project” based on a (real) 1941 book called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns.

I’ve never seen a book approach queer erasure like this, and it blew me away. It combines real censorship from queer history with blackout poetry and unreliable narration from fictional characters to create something entirely new and stirring. As the characters sift through generations of queer inheritance and absence, this ingenious book leaves you to draw the line between history and storytelling, fact and fiction.

Can’t wait to hear what you think of this one ❤️

xo Eric

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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 Páramo, 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's Blackouts 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.

About the Author

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 Magazine, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA.

"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

"Blackouts is a manifesto and a masterwork--an enthralling, dazzling feat of literary bravura. Justin Torres is the real thing."
--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

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub date: October 10, 2023
Length: 320 pages
Format: Hardcover