Bastards by Lippens, Nate
Bastards by Lippens, Nate

Bastards

The conclusion to Nate Lippens' Wisconsin trilogy: a book of losses, memories, and survival. A full-on breakdown,...
$21.54 USD
$21.54 USD
Please hurry! Only 2 left in stock
Author: Nate Lippens
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Subtotal: $21.54
Bastards by Lippens, Nate

Bastards

$21.54
Bastards by Lippens, Nate

Bastards

$21.54
Author: Nate Lippens
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Description
The conclusion to Nate Lippens' Wisconsin trilogy: a book of losses, memories, and survival.

A full-on breakdown, wouldn't that be fabulously dramatic? Instead, I ended up in green gripper socks, sweatpants, and a T-shirt, a look like a California cult member or a suburban schlub (same thing) on a seventy-two-hour hold--a crack-up fortnight--until I started acting like myself. Well, not myself, because how would they know who that is? A facsimile of normal. I mimed coherence, the continuity of a person moving from room to room. I performed my sadness convincingly, pimped memories of Rudy, flensed my crazy down to thimbles of death, an understandable loss.

You win. I say it all the time to people. You win. You won. You're the winner. Congratulations. I said it when a boyfriend told me he didn't love me. I said it on the ward. I said it when I got evicted. You win. Good for you.

Recently sprung from a stint on a psychiatric ward, the narrator of Bastards works hard to perform at being a person while questioning the concept of identity and what it means to be an aging working-class gay man when the word queer has become so elastic and gentrified it's used to conservative ends. Struggling to survive, pay rent, and navigate a hostile world, he takes solace in art and his friends and measures what makes a life.

Borrowing from the tropes of fragmented lyric essays, New Narrative, autofiction, and transgressive literature, Lippens is a bricoleur who creates a confected new form in his short novels. Queer pessimism in the age of affirmation. A search for something honest. An old queen's cackle.

Author: Nate Lippens
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Published: 09/29/2026
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.30w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781635902860

About the Author
Nate Lippens is the author of My Dead Book, Ripcord, and Bastards, and co-wrote the novel Box Office Poison with Matthew Kinlin. His fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Pathetic Literature edited by Eileen Myles and Sluts edited by Michelle Tea, and he edited the zine Truant. His essays and short fiction have been published by Artforum, Delfi, Frieze, Full Stop, Southwest Review, Tank, and The Whitney Review. He lives in Wisconsin.
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