The 2024 Championship
The 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 29 • CHAMPIONSHIP
Blackouts
v. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In the championship match, all of this year’s judges read both finalists, vote for one to win, and briefly tell us how they made their choice. Here are their verdicts.
Isaac Fellman
For me it’s Blackouts, easily. I didn’t always get along with the book’s style, which is peculiar, echoing, subterranean—it can feel like hearing a didactic story whispered through the acoustics of a subway tunnel. Still, it’s a formally exciting experimental novel whose human heart is exquisitely grafted to its mechanics. By contrast, I found The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store sentimental and a little basic, with a cast that’s striking, but too large to develop. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is elegantly plotted and blends several genres with a flourish, but it can’t match Blackouts’ boldness or clarity of purpose.
Blackouts 1 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 0
Leah Schnelbach
How exciting that Blackouts reached the final round, and to be paired with The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store! Such different, wide-ranging views of the American experience. I found The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store extremely moving; it pulls off the miracle of committing to hope without ever becoming cloying. But while I love its scope and bustling humanity, I remain team Blackouts. The richness of its text, Juan and Nene’s stories woven with photography, medical/erasure poetry, blurred reality, queerness—it all came together into such a unique and overwhelming reading experience (i.e., GAY/NERD/DRUGS) that nothing else has matched it.
Blackouts 2 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 0
Lucy Tan
There is a quality I look for in books and rarely find: the feeling that the author must have lost themselves in it for it to have been made. In Blackouts, each page feels intuited rather than planned, giving us a kind of chaos that is coherent and true. Torres has a talent for wringing all the beauty, pain, and insight out of a single moment—and for setting up each moment to reverberate against the others. It’s a novel turned on its head, and my own head is still spinning.
Blackouts 3 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 0
Anna E. Clark
It seems only fair to use the same criteria for judging this matchup that I employed in my initial decision, though like the ToB Commentariat, I have readily absorbed Judge Thorpe’s “is it drugs?” test into my own personal evaluative canon. By my standards of “is the novel the thing it wants to be?” and “does it take over my brain?” The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store succeeds. It’s just so soothing to be in such assured storytelling hands. I could see all the moves it was making—all suspense-generating plot turns, all the affectionate delineation of charmingly individuated characters—and I willingly gave my gray matter over to them. But Blackouts checks both boxes too, with the added excitement of succeeding at being such a funky, compelling novel about novels and stories and narrative generally, and, well, I just love that kind of thing. Those are my drugs. I’m choosing Blackouts, but both novels have a home on my shelf.
Blackouts 4 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 0
Tajja Isen
Both Blackouts and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store are ambitious books that luxuriate in the act of storytelling and feel stuffed full of life. That said, in my estimate, one succeeded far more than the other at actually doing something with all that stuff, and that was Blackouts. Even while it traverses so many different forms and texts, the novel remains remarkably alive and alert, tender and playful, curious and intelligent. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by contrast, felt weighted by a tedious, turgid too-muchness. Mine’s an easy vote for Blackouts.
Blackouts 5 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 0
Dan Kois
I did battle with Blackouts twice—once last fall when it came out, and once this spring when it advanced to the final. In both cases the book defeated me. I admired its formal playfulness and found it a beautiful, unusual object full of wonders; I could not adapt to its rhythms and intricacies and lost my way. I wish I hadn’t, and I can imagine returning to it one or five or 10 years down the line—maybe guided by a friend who loves it, as so many do—and rethinking my response entirely. Torres and McBride both possess imaginations that work overtime, but in this final, I choose the book that shaped its author’s imaginative energies into a yarn rather than a puzzle.
Blackouts 5 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 1
Dan Sinykin
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a capacious social novel, bustling with life and history, much of it the complex history between African Americans and Jews. It resembles great books like James Baldwin's Another Country and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Justin Torres's Blackouts is like little else I've read, weaving together erasure poetry, arresting images, narrative playfulness, and queer counter-histories into a moving tale of a cross-generational friendship. For its sheer inventiveness, I've got to give this one to Blackouts.
Blackouts 6 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 1
Rufi Thorpe
Both of these novels are stunning literary achievements, and they could not be more different. Where Blackouts is metaphysical and otherworldly, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is terrestrial and human. But Blackouts jettisons much of the homely machinery of plot in order to make room for other kinds of insight, and so as a novel it was less successful to me, mostly because it was less novel-like. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for the win!
Blackouts 6 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 2
FROM OUR SPONSOR
Johanna Fateman
I sang the praises of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store when I advanced it. Now, reading judge Dan Kois’s note, that it might have benefited from a closer edit—I agree. There is a slapdashery to it that generally works with the storytelling style, but I don’t love imprecision. Other deficits come to mind when I compare it to Blackouts, which is my winner. I admire this book for its sentence-level exquisiteness and formal daring—for the freedom it claims. The pictures and pages of artfully, almost entirely redacted text really work. The author has done something complex, imaginative, totally seductive.
Blackouts 7 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 2
Kyle Chayka
I’m going with Blackouts for the final for many of the same reasons I picked it in my own round: It resists the tyranny of narrative and embraces something like literary abstraction. Unlike The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, it doesn’t have a huge cast of characters, a central mystery, or much of a setting at all. But it still has as much to say about history and identity, just in a much more impressionistic way. Even though it is a maximalist book in its use of collage, I find its overall simplicity more appealing than its competitor’s sprawl.
Blackouts 8 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 2
Elizabeth Minkel
Well! I’m happy to see everyone now has to make the difficult choice I already made. (Who knows, maybe they’ll find it easy.) Perhaps, as I did on that first go-around, some of my fellow judges will be weighing these books by their stylistic extremes: the warmhearted sprawl of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, tugging you through every house in Chicken Hill, versus the devastating precision of Blackouts, working on you like a scalpel. If I was a particularly chaotic person, I would flip my vote, just for the bit—but Blackouts is still the book that left its marks on me, and it’s a real pleasure to vote for it one more time.
Blackouts 9 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 2
Natashia Déon
I love the dance of language in a good novel, like dancing “the freak” in the 1990s—unwieldy, rhythmic, close, and dangerous. Both Blackouts and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store were that dance. Brilliantly written (and unwritten), Blackouts is the unraveling of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, unreliably; a queer history of erasure. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is skillful, multi-layered, and unexpected. Its themes of community building across cultures, reconciliation, mercy, and justice after murder felt as immediate as reality.
Blackouts 9 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 3
Steffan Triplett
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store ponders how those on the margins might take care of one another. I admire this! Blackouts does something less effable in its pages. Its blurry lines create a nagging feeling that what you’re reading may not exist in any “real” space at all, that its pages might only be filled with “ghosts” out of time. Doesn’t living sometimes feel this way? More than anything, Blackouts led me to new questions: What might we gain from sharing—not just time but our imaginations, our rewrites, our queer reclamations? There might be new ways of looking here. Maybe there’s healing.
Blackouts 10 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 3
Dan Sheehan
Despite the (extremely) leisurely pace with which it unfurls its plot, I greatly enjoyed bedding down in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store’s big-hearted and richly imagined (if, it must be said, excessively peopled) world. James McBride is a Dickensian storyteller par excellence, and this roving portrait of a Depression-era community of unlikely bedfellows is a warm, funny, deceptively substantive melodrama. Having said all that, I gotta give it to Blackouts. Justin Torres’s hybrid work of queer history, autobiography, and dreamy romantic fiction is a special book, an extraordinary book. It’s aching and erotic, playful and profound, ambitious in its structural experimentation without ever succumbing to gimmickry. A pure pleasure from start to finish.
Blackouts 11 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 3
Nicole Acheampong
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store provided me with an eclectic band of fleshed-out characters that I could continue conversing with long after I finished reading them. McBride relentlessly airs out every crevice of his novel’s world, and practically every B plot or even C plot follows its own finely plotted emotional arc. Torres, with Blackouts, doesn’t give me a whole bustling world; he gives me a room. But in using that bare-bones hospice room as the jumping-off point for his loopy, genre-agnostic novel, he opened my eyes to how much momentum a story can enjoy by burrowing deeply into the memories and preoccupations of just a couple characters. I’m voting for the novel that not only moved me the most but also surprised me the most.
Blackouts 12 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 3
Stephen Krause
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a schmaltzy page-turner with utilitarian prose and a story as bittersweet as a star-studded Oscar nominee, its characters cut meticulously out of the narrative traditions from which they’ve been summoned. It is forgettable. Blackouts is studied. It begins as Pedro Páramo. It is in dialogue with Sebald, Kavan, Puig, and on. It is inspired. It also borrows too readily. It is exciting. It doesn’t quite work. It is in that space between what it wants to do and what it does where I think it is the more interesting book. I’m choosing Blackouts.
Blackouts 13 ⏤ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store 3
This year’s champion:
Blackouts
Match Commentary
with the Tournament of Books Staff
Andrew Womack: There we have it. Thank you to our judges for their thoughtful decisions, and we’re pleased to announce this year’s winner is Blackouts by Justin Torres! We reached out and heard back from Justin about the win:
I so love the spirit of this competition, and am grateful to the readers and reviewers for their care and consideration. To my mind, this tournament represents the best of literary culture—thoughtful, generous, and slightly ridiculous. And while “I can’t accept your prize cock, I have nowhere to put it” is not a sentence I ever expected to compose… I gladly accept the sentiment behind the cock; it fills my heart.
Justin declined to accept into his home an actual live rooster, so we’ll be making a donation to 826 National in Blackouts’ honor.
Rosecrans Baldwin: So cool. Well, our hearts are full, in our 20th year, with thanks for Field Notes, our presenting sponsor, whose sustained support of the ToB has played a major part in our endurance and growth, and also for all of our Sustaining Members, who literally make it possible for us to organize this event, year after year. If you haven’t joined yet, please sign up and help us do this next year, our 21st.
Now, let’s hear from our commentators—Meave, Kevin, Alana, John?
Meave Gallagher: Going by vibes alone, it seemed like the opening round made a lot of people cranky, but by the end there was a lot of nostalgia for books left by the wayside. I was glad to see how many hearts Monstrilio claw-tailed itself into, and even though Boys Weekend fell to the mighty Blackouts, some of you expressed an interest in exploring more graphic novels, which makes me very happy. Oh, and shoutout to everyone who reads without commenting—some of you have sent very sweet emails and we are always glad you’re here, even silently. (Shoutout to Sam of Last Week’s New Yorker Review)!
Kevin Guilfoile: I love the response from Justin Torres, and also I think I saw this result coming. Blackouts moved so many people, and even though The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is the kind of novel I prefer to read, I get it. It’s like if you asked me which is a better song, New Order’s “Love Vigilantes” or John Cage’s “4’33”,” I would say “Love Vigilantes”—even though that isn’t even New Order’s best song—because when I listen to music I prefer melody and lyrical hooks over prolonged silence. On the other hand, if, when you were in college, you ever sat in a mostly quiet hall for four-and-a-half minutes while you and several dozen others all pretended you were listening to a song that’s not there, it’s kinda freaking moving. I’d agree that’s more interesting, even though “4’33”” is not on even one of my Spotify playlists. Anyway, huge congratulations to only the fourth-ever winner of the prestigious Rooster/National Book Award combo known as Le Coq National!
Alana Mohamed: You know, I wasn’t fully expecting this one! I’m glad to see Blackouts take Le Coq. I’m not sure if “4’33”” is necessarily the most apt comparison for Blackouts here since Torres gives us a lot to chew on—though Judge Fellman does liken it to a story “whispered through the acoustics of a subway tunnel.”
Kevin: That’s fair. I did not mean to compare Blackouts to silence, nor The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store to 1980s alternative new wave.
Alana: Hehe, I just meant that the ambient noise Torres adds is a bit more orchestrated. I appreciated Judge Krause’s saying that Blackouts is exciting yet doesn’t quite work. Throughout the competition, there’s been lots of conversation about what novels should do, what they can promise, and how they should fulfill those promises. Blackouts is not as “novel-like” as The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, but as Judge Triplett notes, it offers a “new way of looking.” The animal in me wants to throw out the comforting sentimentality of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for the inventive melancholy of Blackouts, but both address a kind of hopelessness one might feel in the world right now. Congratulations to the finalists!
John Warner: I think that “new way of looking” is exactly what a bunch of bookish people like we’ve gathered together here will thrill to, when weighed one on one against a novel that is rather conventional. The daring of Blackouts—it’s probably not a coincidence that the Rooster is the book’s second major award. I’m with the minority on which book I would’ve voted for, but I am famously out of step with the consensus over the years, dating back to choosing Tom Wolfe’s truly absurd I Am Charlotte Simmons over Louis de Bernières Birds Without Wings.
Meave: John, let me ask you: Over the two decades of Tournament-ing, do you have any overlooked favorites? Any novels you wish had made the ToB?
John: I am glad you asked me that because I think there was a significant omission from this year’s tourney, a book that didn’t even make the long list, and for which I 100 percent blame myself given that I read and reviewed it: Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, which just won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. It’s a devastating and deeply weird novel about grief that crushed me when I read it.
Alana: I’m picturing it going up against Monstrilio or The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. What could have been!
John: My system failed though, because when I read a book during the year that I want to be considered for the ToB, I put it in a special pile in my office and then consult the pile when the time comes. I loaned the book out immediately after finishing it, and totally blanked. Mea maxima culpa. Meave, what about you?
Meave: I can remember being disappointed some years that my books didn’t make the cut, but my brain is mostly holes. My first wish is that we’d had the ToB in 1997, specifically because of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. It has everything: sci-fi, faith, culture clash, twists, heartbreak, terror, musings on the meaning of “civilization.” Speaking of, Ann Leckie’s 2013 Ancillary Justice is some solid sci-fi, a mystery, and a critique of imperialism that feels no less relevant today than a decade ago. (I guess I just really like sci-fi that’s less “explaining the technical details of the whatever whatever” and more “here are different ways the author has imagines people could live.”)
John and Kevin, I’d love to know how your view from the booth has changed? Twenty is a fair amount of years to put on the same event, which of course is never “the same” event twice, but still.
John: Quite honestly, the best part of the booth now is that Kevin and I aren’t the only people in it. Even though we always have fun, I think we both get tired of hearing ourselves pontificate matchup after matchup, and for me, I take more pleasure in the days when I have no participatory role and can experience the Tournament from a pure spectator perspective.
Kevin: For sure. Twenty years(!) ago, when this ridiculous thing started, we used to do every single match, and even though we were younger and much more full of ideas (and also, probably, meaner), it wasn’t long before we were repeating ourselves a lot. We still repeat ourselves, but only half as much. That said, John and I are great friends who used to talk in person several times a week when we lived in the same city (we even wrote a book together 23 years ago), and now that we live hundreds of miles away from each other, the Rooster has honestly been the primary reminder for us to communicate. It’s not all in the commentaries—it’s also a lot of email and texts—but this event is a thing that keeps us tethered to one another (and also to all of you), and I am very grateful for that.
I also love the rhythm you and Alana have developed, Meave. Your commentaries feel fresh and effortless to me (as opposed to John and I, who are basically just a couple, cranky, middle-aged men talking to each other), and the ToB is so much better for it.
Alana: That is incredibly nice of you to say, Kevin. I do appreciate how wide you go on these commentaries and the references you reach for. I find myself getting a bit lost in the sauce sometimes. Meave always pulls me back in, though!
Meave: I mean, you do the same for me, Alana!
Alana: Funnily enough, I think ToB now functions similarly for us, keeping us tethered to one another. It’s a great treat to talk books with Meave, even when we disagree!
Meave: I like it when we disagree! And I like it when Kevin and John have different takes on a judgment or a book as well; I always hope we’re giving the Commentariat more to discuss, especially the hardcore group who spend the rest of the year talking ToB in other places. It’s not like any of us is the last word on any novel! But I like to think the Tournament makes a meal—book, judgment, commentary—for readers every day.
Rosecrans: Cheers to that! Well, our guess-the-spread winners for a Field Notes subscription are Phyllis Mann and Mo Pie—please email talk@themorningnews.org so we can coordinate.
And for our first-ever readers’ choice award, the name that received the most support is the Henhouse, and the title that received the most votes was Dayswork! Thank you to everyone who suggested award names and voted for their favorite books from this year’s ToB.
Meave, over to you!
Meave: Commentariat, a couple questions for you. As we move into our third decade, what sorts of books would you like to see in future Tournaments—not necessarily specific titles (though you know my mega spreadsheet of your 2025 recs wants filling), but what genres, styles, publishers? Also, would you prefer to see more of your big-time favorites on a given year’s list, or be surprised by the unknowns the selection committee digs up? We’re all ears.
Andrew: Thank you all—judges, commentators, readers—for another book-filled March! We’ll be back this summer for another edition of Camp ToB. For news about that and everything Rooster-related, make sure you’re subscribed to the Rooster newsletter. We’ll see you again soon!
Today’s mascots
Meet Jamie and Rosie McKitten, East Coast strays that have found themselves in Portland, Ore., with their writer/librarian human, Molly.
Black cat Jamie, a New Yorker, used to nibble on the different books left on the nightstand as a kitten but is now much more fond of pushing them off unsuspecting tables.
Gray and white Rosie, on the other hand, hails from the nation’s capital and is fonder of rubbing her face against the corner of a hardcover in a plea for pets before doing a couple laps of the apartment.
Both are very happy around Tournament of Books time because that means Molly will spend hours on the couch for several months, trying to finish the shortlist before the first week in March. It makes for some excellent lap napping.