Bastards by Nate Lippens

Publishes 29 September
 
Nate Lippens, author of the acclaimed novels My Dead Book, a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and Ripcord, a New Statesman Book of the Year, completes his Wisconsin trilogy with Bastards, a book of losses, memories, and survival.
 
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.
 
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 crackup 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. 
 
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“I can't say enough about how good Nate Lippens's books are” - Gary Indiana
 
“What a gift to encounter such intelligent homosexuality!” - Robert Glück
 
“Nate Lippens is a brilliant writer, and a much-needed voice among the new crop of queer novelists. His portrayals of working-class queers, ex-members of the queercore movement, recovering addicts, and artists, feels new, though somehow also a part of a nearly lost family of queer thinkers: the writers and artists his characters still cherish” - Chicago Review of Books