National Book Award Winner
Blackouts
by Justin Torres
Summary
In a half-abandoned building called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying older friend who shares fragments of his life and a battered, partly redacted mid-century medical study of queer subjects. Torres mixes fiction, archival photographs, and pages of erased text to make a hybrid work about queer memory, lineage, and the violence of clinical language. The novel is at once intimate bedside conversation and formal experiment.
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Historical Context & Significance
The book uses 'erasure poetry' to explore how LGBTQ+ history has been systematically erased or pathologized.