On Monday, April 22nd from 7-8 pm, the New Fiction Book Club will be meeting at Solid State Books in Washington D.C. to discuss the novel Blackouts by Justin Torres. This highly anticipated literary work blends fiction with real accounts to explore themes of queer history, storytelling, love, and reclaiming narratives. The book centers around a young man tending to a dying soul named Juan Gay, who was briefly part of his life but has haunted its edges. Juan has a project involving a groundbreaking early 20th-century book called Sex Variants that collected accounts from queer subjects - accounts that were then co-opted and the researcher's name buried. As Juan nears the end, he and the narrator recount joyful and oblivious moments, resurrecting loves, lives, parents, and minor heroes in an effort to resist the ravages of memory and time. Torres' novel insists we look steadily at what we've inherited and created - a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing truths. The book is a reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter that mines the stories kept from us and brings them into the light. With playful narration and bold exploration of form, art, and love, Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative in a marvel of creative imagination. Book club attendees are sure to be captivated by this unique, genre-blending work that draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences. An RSVP is requested to let the organizers know you'll be joining the insightful discussion of this highly acclaimed new novel.