Binding: Hardcover
Description: Winner of the National Book Award Winner of the California Book Award Winner of Tournament of Books 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 illustrations 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.
Title: Blackouts A Novel
Author(s): Torres Justin
Publisher: Farrar Straus And Giroux
Barcode: 9780374293574
Pages: 320 Pages
Language: English
Publication Date: 10/10/2023
Category: Modern & Contemporary Fiction