Blackouts: A Novel

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 2023. An intimate, emotionally rich novel, in which two men – young and old – reckon with queer histories and their place within them, from the critically acclaimed author of We the Animals. An intimate, emotionally rich novel, in which two men – young and old – reckon with queer histories and their place within them, from the critically acclaimed author of W e the Animals Juan Gay is on his deathbed. He has decided to spend his last days in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert, which was an asylum in another lifetime. There, a young man tends to this dying soul – someone who Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since. As the end approaches, the two trade stories – resurrecting lost loves, lives, mothers and fathers – and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of pathology and oppression. Charged with sifting through Juan’s belongings, our narrator uncovers a copy of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, its pages blacked out, censored, reduced down to poetic dispatches. And, as he sifts through the manuscript, another story is told: that of Jan Gay – a radical, queer anthropologist – whose ground-breaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served. Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, blending fact with fiction – drawing from historical records, screenplays, testimony and image – to force us to look again at the world we have inherited and the narratives we have received. —- ISBN: 9781847083975 | ISBN10: 1847083978 | ISBN-13: 978-1847083975