Blackouts
A Novel
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Blackouts
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Narrated by:
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Ozzie Rodriguez
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Torian Brackett
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Written by:
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Justin Torres
About this listen
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, Time, BookPage
A Must-Read: The New York Times, Time, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Boston Herald, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Bay Area Reporter, Datebook, Electric Literature, The Stacks, Them, Publishers Weekly
“Sweeping, ingenious . . . A kiss to build a dream on.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
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. 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2023 Justin Torres (P)2023 Macmillan AudioWhat the critics say
2023, NYPL Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, National Book Awards - Longlist: Long-listed
2024, California Book Awards - Winner
2024, Orwell Prize Finalists: Short-listed
2023, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee: Short-listed
2023, Washington Post Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, BookPage Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, Powell's Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, NPR Best Book of the Year: Long-listed
2023, L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist: Short-listed
2023, National Book Awards - Winner
2024, Lambda Literary Award - Nominee: Short-listed
2023, The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
"Torian Brackett and Ozzie Rodriguez offer a powerful performance of this 2023 National Book Award winner in which gay men muse over queer history and life.... Brackett's smooth, youthful tones convey the young man's emotions movingly. Rodriguez voices the older Juan, adding distinction with his mature voice and use of Spanish words."—AudioFile
“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
“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
“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