Bastards

Synopsis

Recently released from a psychiatric ward, the narrator of Bastards struggles to perform the role of a coherent, functioning person while questioning what identity means and what it means to be an aging working-class gay man. Haunted by loss, eviction, heartbreak, and memories of Rudy, he moves through a hostile world where survival means paying rent, making sense of grief, and finding reasons to keep going.

With a voice that is fragmented, funny, caustic, and deeply vulnerable, Nate Lippens draws on lyric essays, New Narrative, autofiction, and transgressive literature to create a form all his own. Bastards is a book of losses and survival, queer pessimism and hard-won honesty, and the strange measures by which a life is judged.

About the Author

Nate Lippens is the author of My Dead Book, Ripcord, and Bastards, and co-wrote Box Office Poison with Matthew Kinlin. His fiction has appeared in anthologies including Pathetic Literature and Sluts, and his essays and short fiction have been published by Artforum, Frieze, Full Stop, Southwest Review, Tank, and The Whitney Review. He lives in Wisconsin.

Publisher

Semiotext(e)

Publication Date

September 29, 2026

Format

Paperback

Pages

160

Subjects

LGBTQ+ · Literary Fiction · Gay Fiction · Autofiction · Experimental Fiction · Working-Class Fiction

ISBN

9781635902860