Join our community of readers for a bimont hly book club where we will discuss titles centering queer Latine voices a nd stories with library staff and Los Bookis\, a podcast for queer Latine bookworms. \ ;This space will center queer Latine authors and celebrate storytelling\, community\, and conversation.

Ask for a copy of the book at the Circulation desk in the Mt. Pleasant Lib rary! Or send us an email at mtp leasantlibrary@dc.gov if you have any questions.

Out in the desert in a place c alled the Palace\, a young man tends to a dying soul\, someone he once kne w briefly\, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful r aconteur\, child lost and found and lost\, guardian of the institutionaliz ed--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\, w hich contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher\, Jan Gay\, whose groundbreaking work was t hen 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 resur rect lost loves\, lives\, mothers\, fathers\, minor heroes. The past is wi th us\, beside us\, ahead of us\; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman\, Pedro Pá\;r amo\, Voodoo Macbeth\, the book at its own center and the woman who create d it\, oral histories\, and many more texts\, images\, and influences\, Ju stin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventi ons of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imaginatio n\, 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.

Just Torres is the author of Blackouts\, w hich 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 Crit ics 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\, he&rsquo\;s also received fellowships from the Gug genheim Foundation\, the National Endowment for the Arts\, the Radcliffe I nstitute for Advanced Study at Harvard\, and the New York Public Library&r squo\;s Cullman Center. His first novel\, We the Animals was a national be stseller and adapted into a feature film. He lives Los Angeles\, and is a professor of English at UCLA.

What We&rs quo\;re About:
ðŸ“– Centering queer Latine authors in every book we read
ðŸ’¬ Engaging discussions\, creative activiti es\, and community connection

Who Can Jo in:
Everyone interested in reading and uplifting queer Latin e voices!

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