Justin Torres in gesprek met Ronit Palache

Justin Torres (New York, 1980) won the National Book Award in the United States and the Prix des Inrocktubiles in France for Blackouts. His first novel, We the Animals (2012), was adapted into a film and became a bestseller. He is Professor of English at UCLA.
The Dutch edition of Blackouts, translated by Gerbrand Bakker, will be published two weeks before the festival.

About Blackouts:

In the middle of the desert, in a place called The Palace, a young man tends to his dying friend, Juan Gay. Struggling with his own identity, he sees in Juan erudite, witty, eloquent both a kindred spirit and a guide.

On his deathbed, Juan reveals the project he longs to pass on. In his hands he holds Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1948), a real book documenting queer lives in the first half of the twentieth century. But in it, those voices are filtered, muted, distorted, their truth erased. Juan dreams of restoring what was lost, of offering a counter narrative. Together, the two men dive into the stories of Sex Variants, while also sharing their own memories of shame and desire, grief and joy.

With Blackouts, Justin Torres blends fiction with scholarship, dreamscapes with archival photographs. He shows how queer people across generations have fought to claim their place in history, and he reveals the devastating and illuminating power of stories. Which history do we choose to carry forward?