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Blackouts by Justin Torres — book cover

Blackouts

by Justin Torres

Lambda Literary Award for Fiction · 2024 · ShortlistNational Book Award for Fiction · 2023 · WinnerNational Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction) · 2023 · Shortlist
Farrar, Straus and Girouxliterary-fictionISBN 9780374110598

Award History

About This Book

At a remote resort in the desert, a young narrator cares for the dying Juan Vicente Melo, a man who was involved in a landmark early study of homosexuality called Sex Variants. Together the two men reconstruct a history of queer lives—whose stories were systematically erased from the published record—through photographs, documents, redactions, and fictions, in a novel of extraordinary formal invention.

About the Author

Justin Torres was born in 1980 in Rochester, New York, to a Puerto Rican father and white mother. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught at various institutions. He is widely recognised as one of the most significant voices in queer American literature. Read more →

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