MDTN October 2025 — Blackouts, by Justin Torres

📖 Why this book? 📖

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the California Book Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction

Winner of Tournament of Books

A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Fresh Air, Vanity Fair, NBC News, The BBC, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Granta, The New York Public Library, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Electric Literature, Them, Literary Hub, BookPage, Gay Times, Book Soup, Five Books, Southwest Books

"Like no book I have ever read." — Ari Shapiro, NPR's All Things Considered

"Sweeping, ingenious... A kiss to build a dream on." - Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air(https://www.npr.org/2023/10/16/1205721246/justin-torres-blackouts-review)

From the bestselling author(https://www.npr.org/2023/10/16/1205721246/justin-torres-blackouts-review) of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories — personal and collective.

(NPR review and author interview at this link(https://www.npr.org/2023/10/16/1205721246/justin-torres-blackouts-review))

Hard to find a book? Suggest a title(https://www.saclibrary.org/Books-Media/Reading-Recommendations/Recommend-a-Title) or use Zip Books(https://www.saclibrary.org/Books-Media/Reading-Recommendations/Recommend-a-Title) at your local library.

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door will be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

💬 We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes,
🧊 just before 7pm we do a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend,
📕 and then we start our book discussion.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack or drink to share
◾️$5 (cash or Venmo(https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon))
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 is split between our access to this Meetup platform and our access to the meeting location.

You can venmo me ([https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon](https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon)) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 BOOK SUMMARY 📚

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, illus-trations, 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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