Readings and Talks Featuring Justin Torres
Posted in Announcements
March 16, 2027 at 7:00PM ET
Location: Copley Formal Lounge
Join us for a reading and conversation with Justin Torres, author of Blackouts, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and the California Book Award, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary award, the Inside Literary Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. A 2025 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy, Torres has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by March 9th to Patricia Guzman, 202-687-6294, pg654@georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests made after March 9th.
Excerpt from We The Animals by Justin Torres
NEVER-NEVER TIME
We all three sat at the kitchen table in our raincoats, and Joel smashed tomatoes with a small rubber mallet. We had seen it on TV: a man with an untamed mustache and a mallet slaughtering vegetables, and people in clear plastic ponchos soaking up the mess, having the time of their lives. We aimed to smile like that. We felt the pop and smack of tomato guts exploding; the guts dripped down the walls and landed on our cheeks and foreheads and congealed in our hair. When we ran out of tomatoes, we went into the bathroom and pulled out tubes of our mother’s lotions from under the sink. We took off our raincoats and positioned ourselves so that when the mallet slammed down and forced out the white cream, it would get everywhere, the creases of our shut-tight eyes and the folds of our ears.
Our mother came into the kitchen, pulling her robe shut and rubbing her eyes, saying, “Man oh man, what time is it?” We told her it was eight-fifteen, and she said [expletive], still keeping her eyes closed, just rubbing them harder, and then she said [expletive] again, louder, and picked up the teakettle and slammed it down on the stove and screamed, “Why aren’t you in school?”
It was eight-fifteen at night, and besides, it was a Sunday, but no one told Ma that. She worked graveyard shifts at the brewery up the hill from our house, and sometimes she got confused. She would wake randomly, mixed up, mistaking one day for another, one hour for the next, order us to brush our teeth and get into PJs and lie in bed in the middle of the day; or when we came into the kitchen in the morning, half asleep, she’d be pulling a meat loaf out of the oven, saying, “What is wrong with you boys? I been calling and calling for dinner.”
Continue reading from We The Animals at The New York Times.
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