Justin Torres

The Brooklyn childhoods of three brothers are marked by their parents' volatile passions and their own destructive antics, in the story of a chaotic family that explores the ways in which a youth's coming-of-age profoundly shapes his world view. 30,000 first printing.

We the Animals

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal and collective. 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—has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories 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. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories—moments of joy and oblivion—and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.

A Novel

Blackouts

« On en voulait encore. [...] On avait des os d'oiseaux creux et légers, on voulait plus d'épaisseur, plus de poids. On était six mains qui happaient et six pieds qui trépignaient ; on était des frères, des garçons, trois petits rois unis dans un complot pour en avoir encore. »

La famille, c'est la jungle. Les parents s'aiment, se battent. Au milieu du chaos, trois enfants tentent de grandir. La meute observe les fauves. Quand le père danse, les petits l'imitent. Quand la mère dort, ils apprennent à rester silencieux. La vie animale est âpre. Mais l'imaginaire est sans limite.

Avec ce premier roman impressionnant, Justin Torres impose une langue, un rythme, un lyrisme électrique.

Vie animale 

Juan Gay is on his deathbed. He has decided to spend his last days in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert, which was an asylum in another lifetime. There, a young man tends to this dying soul - someone who Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since. As the end approaches, the two trade stories - resurrecting lost loves, lives, mothers and fathers - and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of pathology and oppression. Charged with sifting through Juan's belongings, our narrator uncovers a copy of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, its pages blacked out, censored, reduced down to poetic dispatches. And, as he sifts through the manuscript, another story is told: that of Jan Gay - a radical, queer anthropologist - whose ground-breaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served. Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, on the ways in which stories sustain histories. Both emotionally and intellectually daring, Justin Torres blends fact with fiction - drawing from historical records, screenplays, testimony and image - force us to look again at the world we have inherited and the narratives we have received.

Crewelwork

Biz Hayvanlar

De drie zoons van een Puertoricaanse vader en een Amerikaanse moeder worden, doordat beide ouders werken, vaak aan hun lot overgelaten, wat leidt tot een sterke onderlinge band, maar ook tot spanningen.

Wij, de wilden / druk 1

Drie broertjes worstelen zich door hun kinderjaren. Ze zijn elkaars beste vriend maar ook elkaars grootste vijand. Ze houden tomatengevechten in de keuken, bouwen vliegers van afval en spelen verstoppertje wanneer hun ouders ruzie maken. Het is niet eenvoudig in deze familie te overleven. De liefde tussen hun Puerto Ricaanse vader en blanke moeder is hevig en bij vlagen destructief. Er heerst altijd chaos en het leven is wreed en fascinerend tegelijk. Het jongste broertje neemt de lezer moeiteloos mee in hun turbulente bestaan. Maar gaandeweg verliest hij zijn onbevangenheid en komt tot het besef dat hij zijn leven een radicale wending moet geven.

Justin Torres

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