TuesdayNovember 19th
6:30pm
McNally Jackson welcomes Justin Torres and Jenna Johnson, celebrating the paperback release of Torres' newest book: Blackouts. McNally Jackson's Author/Editor conversation series dives into these thousands of small decisions with some of the most exciting writers and editors working today as they discuss their collaborative process, and the ways their tiny decisions come together to create some of our favorite books.
Winner of the National Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Tournament of Books.
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.
“Sweeping, ingenious . . . A kiss to build a dream on.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“An extraordinary achievement . . . A perfect book.”—Bill Goldstein, Weekend Today in New York
Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, and the Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of English at UCLA.
Jenna Johnson is Editor in Chief at FSG. In addition to Blackouts, she has published a range of award-winning and bestselling fiction and nonfiction. Some of her recent publications include Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Witness by Jamel Brinkley, Luster by Raven Leilani, Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght, Circle of Hope by Eliza Griswold, and Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. She was also Justin's editor for We the Animals.
RSVP Below
We kindly ask attendees to hold their place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the event on any product in store or in our bar & café. If you have a change of heart or plans, write to events@mcnallyjackson.com and we'll gladly refund you and release your spot, up to 24 hours before the event. Thanks for understanding, and for supporting your local bookstore.
