Blackouts

"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.”"