Blackouts

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD: an intimate, emotionally rich novel, in which two men - young and old - reckon with queer histories and their place within them

Drawing on documents and images from real-life pioneers, the hugely ambitious Blackouts is an intimate, playful account of an old and a young man talking; but it builds into a rich, poetic reclamation of cultural inheritance

Blackouts is a palimpsestic and vauntingly ambitious novel...

A poetic, affecting novel written with intelligence and warmth

If you locked Shirley Jackson and David Wojnarowicz in a room together, they might invent the kind of mouldering dreamworld that Justin Torres conjures in Blackouts: a queer-gothic version of the Hotel California... Blackouts is both a tale and a product of queer inheritance. It is a book that honours its ghosts... It is a novel of mercies and indignities; bruises and bones; the tangled eroticism of life and death.

Erotic and beguiling... An intelligent, loving, and genuinely subversive work

Enigmatic, spine-tingling, imbued with inky atmosphere and radiant disclosures - a book like a magic trick

All intelligence and surprises. Ambitious, disarming, full of a kind of daring that winks as it passes-as if David Wojnarowicz rewrote Nabokov's Pale Fire and then left it for years in an abandoned building, just for you

A master of the urgent, surprising sentence... A narrative that is as much about what is on the page as what has been painstakingly cut away... A stunning achievement of re-creation, imagination and tender, tender care. Read it and feel held

I'm crushed out on Justin Torres's writing: charming, sexy, soft, and full of truth. His words cut like Cupid's arrow

Blackouts is unequivocally brilliant, bold, and structurally inventive. Justin Torres has written a shamelessly vital novel that reminds us all not to give up on ourselves, on one another, or on our stories

I felt deep joy in reading Justin Torres' new novel of queer histories and erasure. Shapeshifting and ambitious, it's super special and speaks to where we are now, through our collective queer past

Wonderful. A dexterous, searing exploration of queer lives that leaves you quietly reeling

This ambitious novel forces the reader to reflect on whose histories are shared and which are left decaying in the dark

Torres' latest literary triumph... Blackouts seamlessly blends fact and fiction... This determination to rewrite corrupted history encapsulates the spirit of a wonderful novel

Blackouts is a collage, a compendium, as impressive and frustrating as any work that dares to go its own way. It reminds us that Torres is a very good writer

By turns disturbing, erotic and moving... Torres has dived deep into the mysteries of a hidden past to create a work that is both formally innovative - in ways that recall contemporary writers as different as Ben Lerner, Garth Greenwell and Sheila Heti - and politically valuable

Blackouts is able both to inhabit and to break out of the solemn-sincere register that characterizes much gay fiction - to meander freely in tone and mood... Torres's prose remains free of showy erudition... A novel that excels at emblematic concision

Intriguing... Personally, I adore it... Blackouts is pleasingly erotic in the intensity of its central relationship

JUSTIN TORRES is the author of We the Animals, and has published short fiction in the New Yorker, Harper's and Granta, among other publications. The National Book Foundation named him as one of their '5 under 35' in 2012. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.