![Bastards (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) [9781635902860]](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-gjd9kmzlkz/stencil/7c09c300-14ca-013f-ddfb-4eb4d192a410/e/63763690-1ba2-013f-b05e-76113b34edc9/img/ProductDefault.gif "Bastards (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) [9781635902860]")
Overview
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.
The book, Bastards (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN#9781635902860 in Paperback by Nate Lippens may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 25 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.
Details
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
10/13/2026
ISBN-10:
163590286X
ISBN-13:
9781635902860
Pages:
168
Publisher:
MIT Press
