Bastards (Paperback)

Paperback. The conclusion to Nate Lippens' Wisconsin trilogy: a book of losses, memories, and survival.A full-on breakdown, wouldnt 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 holda crack-up fortnightuntil 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. Youre the winner. Congratulations. I said it when a boyfriend told me he didnt 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 its 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 queens cackle. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…