Recommendations from our site
“Blackouts by Justin Torres is a formal masterpiece, creating its own zone beyond the story it tells: a redacted history of queer sexology via an intergenerational deathbed dialogue. This intricate collage of record and remembrance is held together by poetry, art, photography, and institutional documents, and hinges its political world-building on the pleasures to be had in this compilation. In exquisite prose, Torres shows how choosing another inheritance might alter a future that seems inexorable” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
“At the 2023 National Book Awards, Justin Torres (We the Animals) won the fiction prize for Blackouts, an experimental novel in which an older gay man slowly dying in the desert converses with a younger, unnamed narrator who has come to care for him. It is ‘festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding endnotes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures,’ as NPR has explained, and concerns the distortions, confessions, and erasures of queer history.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
