Literary Fiction · MelancholicTwo men in a place called the Palace try to finish a lost study of queer lives
Blackouts
A young man with gaps in his memory is asked to finish a forgotten study of gay lives
Nene, a young man who has gaps in his memory, goes to visit Juan Gay, who is dying in a place called the Palace. Juan has found Sex Variants, a 1941 study that drew on interviews collected by a journalist named Jan Gay. He asks Nene to complete the work. Their conversations unfold alongside pages from the book itself: documents, photographs, passages with words blacked out, and endnotes.
More about this book
Who
Nene, a young man who has lapses in memory, and Juan Gay, an older man who is dying.
World
A place called the Palace, where Juan lives out his last days, and the history of the 1941 study Sex Variants and its sources.
What makes it different
It reads like a collage. Besides the story, it includes documents, photographs, redacted excerpts and endnotes.
Feel
Quiet and haunting. It won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- BlackoutsWikipedia