I’m 43, about to be 44. The generation right above me is kind of a lost generation, wiped out by the pandemic, but not entirely wiped out, right? There are a lot of people from that generation that I’m friends with. And then, the generation above that is leaving the Earth all the time right now. But one thing that works as a through line down to my generation, is this idea that you laugh at yourself. It’s something in the queer sensibility, something about camp, a part of the lesson: Don’t take it too seriously. The world’s going to give you fucking shit. You’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself.
― Justin Torres, Interview, Interview Magazine
What booksellers are saying about Blackouts
- A beguiling collage of intimate conversations, lost histories, censored documents, imagined movies, regrets, and passions bound together with utmost care and a disarming tenderness. With Blackouts Torres has struck a perfect balance between generosity and restraint that will invite conversation, curiosity, and a hope for the future. Truly fine art.
― Luis Correa from Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA | Buy from Avid Bookshop
- Blackouts is the first novel from Justin Torres in over a decade (if you haven’t read We the Animals, it’s beautiful!) and, trust me, it’s well worth the wait. Part ghost story, part personal narrative, part archival study, Blackouts is an incredible examination of cultural memory and what we lose when we erase queer histories. Blackouts is a beautiful testament to storytelling as an act of preservation.
― Lindsay Lynch from Parnassus Books in Nashville, TN | Buy from Parnassus Books
- This book wrecked me in ways I can’t find words for and can’t stop talking about anyway. At its core, this is a story of two queer men sharing memories and talking about their lives, both of them knowingly hazy on the details and emotionally honest, but it’s also an intimate collage of factual records, fictional accounts, lived reality, erasure, and oral history. The result is a gift: a tender, challenging, loving retelling of queer experience that is nothing short of exquisite. Structurally inventive and emotionally expansive, this is a book to spend time with, to read what isn’t there as well as what’s left on the page, the redactions—and the act of redacting—inseparable from the story.
― Miranda Sanchez, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews, Raleigh, North Carolina | Buy from Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews
About Justin Torres
Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of English at UCLA.
