Blackouts: A Novel
Written by Justin Torres
Narrated by Ozzie Rodriguez and Torian Brackett
4/5
()
About this audiobook
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 to this new narrator. 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.
Editor's Note
National Book Award winner.…
An unnamed narrator and his elderly friend Juan pore over a research study about gay men and lesbians, while sharing their own experiences being queer. While the narrator and Juan’s stories are fiction, the study is real: It was pioneered in 1941 by lesbian researcher Jan Gay, whose work was twisted by others into a homophobic indictment against queer people. Through this lens, Torres mines erasure, the restoration of truth, and the power of storytelling.
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 a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.
Related to Blackouts
Related audiobooks
The Lookback Window: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Change Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Let Us Descend: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Say Hello to My Little Friend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Greta & Valdin: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Absolution: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Julia: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wren, the Wren Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Other Eden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fruit of the Dead: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alice Sadie Celine Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hive and the Honey Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5You Only Call When You're in Trouble: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Creep: Accusations and Confessions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poor Deer: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Say Babylon: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Witness: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dazzling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Storm We Made: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cemetery of Untold Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death Valley: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ripe: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brooklyn Crime Novel: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Swim Home to the Vanished: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Librarianist: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wandering Souls: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Open Throat Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Fiction For You
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Covenant of Water Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Measure: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: A Hunger Games Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stardust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hunger Games Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Yellowface: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tom Lake: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Picture of Dorian Gray: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The House in the Cerulean Sea Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kindred Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Left Hand of Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dutch House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Blackouts
27 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Incredible book. A modern day Hemingway in our hands and I’m so inspired.