Los Bookis Queer Latine Book Club

Join our community of readers for a bimonthly book club where we will discuss titles centering queer Latine voices and 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. Los Bookis Meetup Thursday, July 9, 2026 6:15 PM – 7:45 PM Blackouts Justin Torres . Ask for a copy of the book at the Circulation desk in the Mt. Pleasant Library! Or send us an email at mtpleasantlibrary@dc.gov if you have any questions. . About the Book: Blackouts 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. About the Author: Justin Torres Just Torres is the author of Blackouts, which 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 Critics 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’s also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His first novel, We the Animals was a national bestseller and adapted into a feature film. He lives Los Angeles, and is a professor of English at UCLA. What We’re About: 📖 Centering queer Latine authors in every book we read 💬 Engaging discussions, creative activities, and community connection Who Can Join: Everyone interested in reading and uplifting queer Latine voices! Please fill out this short form to be added to our email list serv