Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Bastards, (Paperback)

<b>The conclusion to Nate Lippens' Wisconsin trilogy: a book of losses, memories, and survival.</b> <p><i>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. </i> </p><p><i> 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.</i> </p><p>Recently sprung from a stint on a psychiatric ward, the narrator of <i>Bastards</i> 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 <i>queer</i> 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. </p><p>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.</p>

• Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Bastards, (Paperback)
• Author: Semiotext(e)
• ISBN: 9781635902860
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-09-29
• Page Count: 160