Blackouts: A Novel by Justin Torres

Winner of the National Book Award for FictionA Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, BookPage, The New York Public Library, Powell’sA Must-Read: 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 AirFrom 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, 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 colle