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.

Historical Context & Significance

The book uses 'erasure poetry' to explore how LGBTQ+ history has been systematically erased or pathologized.