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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.