Justin Torres: Blackouts

At the core of the novel Blackouts is the imagined deathbed conversations between a young, unnamed narrator (referred to as Nene) and his friend and elder, Juan Gay. As Juan waits for his end, the two recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion, resurrecting loves, lives, mothers, fathers, and minor heroes. Juan shares his tattered and redacted copy of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and passes on his final wish: that Nene complete the story of Jan Gay, the real-life researcher whose early-20th-century interviews with queer people across the United States and Europe offered the foundation of Sex Variants, but whose contributions ended up being eclipsed—and all but erased—by the scientists whose legitimacy she required to publish her work. A dream-like and genre-defying creation, Blackouts incorporates erasure, photographs, testimony, illustrations, imaginary screenplays, and more as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made.

Justin Torres is a novelist celebrated for a distinctly lyrical style that weaves truth and fiction, blending genres as he explores queer art, love, lineage, life, and death—and the multifaceted dynamics between family, friends, mentors, and strangers—through narrative. He is the author of Blackouts, winner of the 2023 National Book Award, and the instant contemporary queer classic We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages and adapted into a feature film. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Torres 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, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and was a recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. He is at work on a new novel.

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