This was one of those books that once you pick it up you don’t want to put it down. Blackouts is largely written as a series of conversations and anecdotes shared between two characters; it is also told through imagery and modified text and is part personal drama and part historical fiction. As I was reading, I found myself continually thinking about the history of homosexuality in the modern world and the shared experience of LGBTQIA+ individuals across time. This book—albeit in microcosm—explores these larger themes and the ways in which we can reappropriate a past that can be full of pain . Even though it is a shorter book, it is one of those rare books that has an ambitious reach of a much longer novel. It is written in short “flashes” of dialogue and memory, making is a breezy but impactful novel that sticks with you. I look forward to reading Torres’ earlier novel!

Blackouts is Justin Torres's latest novel, more than a decade in the making. It is extraordinary. Formally, the book is reminiscent of the Argentine novel, El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman), a conversation between two queer men - both non-white, from different generations - which reorients the novel into a storytelling form steeped in an oral tradition, saturated with a queer sensibility. Substantively, this can be read as a retelling of queer history itself, part of which includes a deconstruction of historical understandings of identity and sexuality, including an exploration of the way those concepts were constructed in the first place. There are several instances of intertextuality, touching on the 1941 study "Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns" and several iterations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). We see the boundary between normal and abnormal defined historically with a colonialist agenda, pathologizing bodies and experiences that are non-white, non-masculine, non-cis, etc. Sexuality, race, class, masculinity, and other themes are examined. It is also a story about love, friendship, aging, and family. The dialogue is so witty and yet so personal. There is a generosity and tenderness to this story that is exquisite. Many thanks to the US publisher, FSG, for making a digital ARC available via Netgalley.

Okay, wow that hurt. There was a portion of this book that I had to put down and rub my face for a moment because it was such an intensely emotional portrayal of a breakup and emotional damage that I just needed a moment to process it.

Justin Torres is a new favorite author.

How does one manage to write a 300+ page book that's entirely composed of the conversations between two gay men, loop in queer theory and discussions about race and medical discrimination, and write tenderly and erotically, and maintain my attention and my emotional investment?

This book was the kind of densely poetic writing that Garth Greenwell does so well. Writing that feels like it has a pulse, characters that are such beautiful avatars of queer loneliness and the intense desire for queer intimacy and connection. I saw myself in both Juan and the unnamed narrator at his bed side in my own experiences as a queer person. This is one of those books were the phrase, *It made me feel less alone" really comes to mind because this book did that. It made me feel like I have a place in this world - both in the literary sense as well as the real life sense.

A spectacular, ambitious book that I devoured over the course of two days. Definitely in awe of Justin Torres' talent and sheer writing capabilities.

Thank you endlessly to FSG and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book early!

A fascinating break from the fine-chiseled structure of Torres's famous debut, "We the Animals," "Blackouts" is a kind of wild experiment, a mixture with elements of auto- and metafiction, incorporating blackout poetry and blurring the line between fact and fiction (I'm reminded of Benjamín Labatut's "When We Cease to Understand the World") as it takes on the lives of real, but mostly unknown, people, shaping them into a larger narrative. The story at its core involves a nameless narrator, a young gay Puerto Rican man, and Juan, a kind of life mentor he met many years ago in a mental institution. Now dying in an old building called The Palace, the narrator seeks to understand the project Juan has been working on for many years so that he can take it over on Juan's death; it's a kind of documentation of "Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns," a real book by George W. Henry, and the study's participants, some of whom seem to be close to Juan and his history. Blackout poems formed from the text are interspersed throughout. Most of the 'action' is stories told from Juan to the narrator or vice versa; there's an absolutely wonderful section where the narrator turns elements from his life into a 'film' and 'tells' the film to Jean, complete with descriptions of the shots. I enjoyed reading a lot, but I found it hard to follow; this is a book that for me will require a reread before I can really organize my thoughts. Needless to say I think there's a lot here.

Fascinating and utterly compelling. Multiple lives and histories, individual and groups, scientists or quasi-scientists and laypeople, mix and meld in this hybrid novel that includes historical documents with much erasure, memories told in varying ways- as stories, as movies - set in an unnamed dusty town perhaps in another country, in a single room in a place called the Palace, where Juan is dying, and the narrator has come to be with him. Voices of the past and present, the linking together of stories, of people, of sexuality, identity, and more.

i feel a little bummed because i thought i’d love this one, but i felt as though it simply tried too hard to be original. i feel as though the influence of “house of leaves” is more than visible (although i could be totally wrong here) and i don’t really think it was properly delivered, honestly.

Absolutely beautiful! Breathtaking and heartbreaking in equal measures. It took me longer to read this than the page count made it seem like it would but that's because I wanted to take my time and reread pages so, so often.

Justin Torres is back!!!!!!! I cannot explain how excited I was to jump into this, and it did not disappoint. It's very much working at a different register from WE THE ANIMALS; at a sentence and syntax level, these are very different pieces of work. Thematically, however, I can see the Torres DNA. But this novel is far stranger, far more opaque. I loved it, and will recommend it for years to come. Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.

Fascinating text. Told with a great sense of motion and pacing. Sometimes a little challenging to read, but altogether an exciting find. I am looking forward to reading Torres' first book next.

It takes a great skill to weave queerness, race, class, gender together with history, medicine, politics, economy, and a great talent to weave these in such a way to tell a story as poignant as this one. However, it takes an artist to produce an artwork, and especially an artwork from the ways various oppressive discourses erase those who appear at the intersection of these aspects of being in the world as the most powerless. Beautiful novel.

It's been over a decade since "We the Animals" burst onto the literary scene and changed America's view of the power punch a slim novel could deliver. Then we waited and waited for the second novel to appear. It didn't. Still, we waited. Lucky for us, the wait is over. Blackouts delivers the same one two punch as Torre's first novel. Let's just hope we don't have to wait another decade for the next one. His writing is just too delicious to be without for such long stretches of time.