Justin Torres

Justin Torres is a novelist celebrated for a distinctly lyrical style that weaves truth and fiction, blending genres as he explores queer art, love, lineage, life, and death—and the multifaceted dynamics between family, friends, mentors, and strangers—through narrative. He is the author of the “shimmering, fable-like novel” (Washington Post) Blackouts, winner of the 2023 National Book Award, and the instant contemporary queer classic We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages and adapted into a feature film.

Excerpt from Blackouts by Justin Torres

I came to the Palace because the man I sought kept a room there. He stood at the point of egress, supporting himself against the door frame, not just thin, but skeletal; lips shrunken and chapped; the skin of his face pulled taut over the skull. I led him back to the bed, where he looked at me, kind yet wild. His eyes burned with life, as if the spirit had left the flesh and concentrated there, in irises bright and glassy, the milk of the whites unsullied. His voice, though fey, came hale and lucid, and when he spoke, he did so without obstruction, no wheezing, no confusion (that is, until the final hours, when he slipped into delirium, speaking nonsense and quoting from literature). I told him I would stay, play bed nurse, however long it took. The truth is I had nowhere else to go, and both of us knew as much. Juan insisted that, after his death, I remain in the Palace and take over his room. He asked that I finish the project that had once consumed him, the story of a certain woman who shared his last name. Miss Jan Gay. “Come,” he said with a wink, “squeeze mother’s hands as a sign you will do it.” This was an allusion to some famous scene I could not place; it was not a joke. I took his hands, all knuckles and finger bones, into my own. He was near death, and I would have promised him anything.

“I had never meant to keep my promise. But before I knew it my head began to swim with dreams … What’s that from?”

“I don’t know, Juan. But I will keep this one. I mean to.”

“Some call her one thing, some another,” he said. “Yahn, or Jan, or Helen. Holy fairy, mother of grace. Our Father who art in between.”

I had ventured off to the Palace with the last of my money, alone after all had been lost to the metropolis. I had no work, no degree and no pedigree, no feel for the game, no man to support me. I bought a ticket for a bus headed west, to a small city thousands of miles and several days away—to the place where I suspected Juan might have retreated. I carried a single duffel bag stuffed with clothes. Hour upon hour, I watched the landscape change, through windows filmed over with grease. When once I tried to rub clean the view, using the edge of my sleeve, I instead created a halation effect, like the Vaseline smudge of an Old Hollywood close-up. There I was, nose unscarred, black curls tamed, every hard feature softened in reflection.

Read more from Blackouts at Macmillan.

Links

• “Justin Torres’s Art of Exposure and Concealment” by Katy Waldman. The New Yorker. December 31, 2023.
• “A Radical Queer Novel Challenges the Idea of History Itself” by Hugh Ryan. The New York Times. October 9, 2023.
• “‘Queer art can be de-sexed – I don’t want to be a part of that’: author Justin Torres on going gothic” by Ryan Gilbey. The Guardian. November 4, 2023.