Blackouts

Blackouts is a novel by Justin Torres that blends fiction, history and visual art. Its unnamed narrator, a man in his twenties, comes to a run-down building to sit with Juan, a dying older friend he first met years earlier when both were patients at a psychiatric hospital. Juan has been working on a project built around Sex Variants, a 1941 study of gay and lesbian lives that drew on research gathered by Jan Gay, a writer and researcher whose role was largely forgotten. Juan's copy of the study has been heavily blacked out, turning the surviving words into poems, and he asks the narrator to carry the work forward. Moving between the two men's conversations and a fictionalized account of Gay's life, and illustrated with archival images, the novel reflects on memory, erasure and queer history. It won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.