Blackouts
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Blackouts is a story about stories and storytelling, a tale of history written, unwritten, and redacted. A young man travels to the desert to visit a dying elder whose life and work both reveal and conceal the history of queer American lives. With Blackout Poetry using historical textbooks as its foundation, Torres beautifully illustrates the clear revelation of perception when we sift through the extraneous to truly see the essence of language and life. (Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh) The novel innovates in narrative and structure to express the experience of the outsider in literary history. (Chicago Public Library)