At the 2023 National Book Awards, Justin Torres ( We the Animals ) won the fiction prize for Blackouts , an experimental novel in which an older gay man slowly dying in the desert converses with a younger, unnamed narrator who has come to care for him. It is “festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding endnotes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures,” as NPR has explained , and concerns the distortions, confessions, and erasures of queer history . (I suspect that, if you enjoy Blackouts , you will also enjoy Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X —another slippery creature that takes the form of a fictional biography, with semi-fictional source notes.) Earlier in the year, Ling Ma (author of the brilliant post-pandemic novel Severance ) triumphed at the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards with Bliss Montage , a highly acclaimed collection of eight short stories. “The collection guts and renovates the genre by refusing to draw a distinction between realism and fable,” noted the judges. “Freed from the constraints of allegory or standard-issue plot mechanics, readers are instead left to reflect on more essential things, most prominently, humanity’s ability to absorb and inflict harm.”
"At the 2023 National Book Awards, Justin Torres ( We the Animals ) won the fiction prize for Blackouts , an experimental novel in which an older gay man slowly dying in the desert converses with a younger, unnamed narrator who has come to care for him. It is “festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding endnotes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures,” as NPR has explained , and concerns the distortions, confessions, and erasures of queer history . (I suspect that, if you enjoy Blackouts , you will also enjoy Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X —another slippery creature that takes the form of a fictional biography, with semi-fictional source notes.) Earlier in the year, Ling Ma (author of the brilliant post-pandemic novel Severance ) triumphed at the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards with Bliss Montage , a highly acclaimed collection of eight short stories. “The collection guts and renovates the genre by refusing to draw a distinction between realism and fable,” noted the judges. “Freed from the constraints of allegory or standard-issue plot mechanics, readers are instead left to reflect on more essential things, most prominently, humanity’s ability to absorb and inflict harm.”"
"Blackouts is an immersive experience. This National Book Award winner contains photographs, illustrations and handwritten letters – ephemera that help tell the story of an early 20th-century lesbian researcher and activist named Jan Gay. Justin Torres embeds her real-life story (complete with cameos from Andy Warhol, Emma Goldman and Martin Scorsese) in a fictional (or is it?) dialogue between a dying man named Juan Gay and a young unnamed narrator. The book is mysterious, sexy and layered, and as soon as I finished it, I wanted to go back and read it again."
