320 pages | hardcover |

From the bestselling author ofWe the Animals,Blackoutsmines lost historiespersonal 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 Gayplayful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalizedhas 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 storiesmoments of joy and oblivionand 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 byKiss of the Spider Woman,Pedro Pramo,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’sBlackoutsis 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 madea world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.