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.
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, thro
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