Blackouts A Novel Justin Torres by Justin Torres 9780374716677, 0374716676 instant download after payment.

National Book Award for Fiction shortlist 

From the author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal & 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 & found & 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—& its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early 20th 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 & 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 & the narrator recount for each other moments of joy & oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories & the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory & time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps & erasures?

A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, & potential for change—& a bold exploration of form, art, & love, Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history & narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, & a range of influences as it insists that we look long & steadily at what we have inherited & what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows & flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, & a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us & brings them into the lig