Description

Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him – someone whom Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.

As the end approaches, the two trade stories – resurrecting lost loves, mothers and fathers – and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of sexuality, pathology and oppression. And, through their conversations, another story is told: that of the radical queer anthropologist Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.

Blending fact with fiction, and drawing on oral histories and historical records, screenplay, testimony and image, Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure – on the ways in which stories sustain histories.

Publisher Review

Drawing on documents and images from real-life pioneers, the hugely ambitious Blackouts is an intimate, playful account of an old and a young man talking; but it builds into a rich, poetic reclamation of cultural inheritance — What to read this autumn: 2023’s biggest new books * The Guardian * Blackouts is a palimpsestic and vauntingly ambitious novel… * Sunday Telegraph * A poetic, affecting novel written with intelligence and warmth * I Paper * If you locked Shirley Jackson and David Wojnarowicz in a room together, they might invent the kind of mouldering dreamworld that Justin Torres conjures in Blackouts: a queer-gothic version of the Hotel California… Blackouts is both a tale and a product of queer inheritance. It is a book that honours its ghosts… It is a novel of mercies and indignities; bruises and bones; the tangled eroticism of life and death. * Guardian * Erotic and beguiling… An intelligent, loving, and genuinely subversive work — Eleanor Catton Enigmatic, spine-tingling, imbued with inky atmosphere and radiant disclosures – a book like a magic trick — Jeremy Atherton Lin 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 A master of the urgent, surprising sentence… A narrative that is as much about what is on the page as what has been painstakingly cut away… A stunning achievement of re-creation, imagination and tender, tender care. Read it and feel held — Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House 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 Blackouts is unequivocally brilliant, bold, and structurally inventive. 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 Dominicana and How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water I felt deep joy in reading Justin Torres’ new novel of queer histories and erasure. Shapeshifting and ambitious, it’s super special and speaks to where we are now, through our collective queer past — Niven Govinden Wonderful. A dexterous, searing exploration of queer lives that leaves you quietly reeling — Irenosen Okojie This ambitious novel forces the reader to reflect on whose histories are shared and which are left decaying in the dark * The Skinny * Torres’ latest literary triumph… Blackouts seamlessly blends fact and fiction… This determination to rewrite corrupted history encapsulates the spirit of a wonderful novel * The List * Blackouts is a collage, a compendium, as impressive and frustrating as any work that dares to go its own way. It reminds us that Torres is a very good writer * Financial Times * By turns disturbing, erotic and moving… Torres has dived deep into the mysteries of a hidden past to create a work that is both formally innovative – in ways that recall contemporary writers as different as Ben Lerner, Garth Greenwell and Sheila Heti – and politically valuable * i Paper * Blackouts is able both to inhabit and to break out of the solemn-sincere register that characterizes much gay fiction – to meander freely in tone and mood… Torres’s prose remains free of showy erudition… A novel that excels at emblematic concision * TLS * Intriguing… Personally, I adore it… Blackouts is pleasingly erotic in the intensity of its central relationship * Irish Times *