{"product_id":"bastards","title":"Bastards","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe conclusion to Nate Lippens' Wisconsin trilogy: a book of losses, memories, and survival.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eA 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. \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003e 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.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eRecently sprung from a stint on a psychiatric ward, the narrator of \u003ci\u003eBastards\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003equeer\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBorrowing 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.","brand":"Semiotext(e)","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":52911834562871,"sku":"9781635902860","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0934\/9926\/1239\/files\/imageloader_e629e214-1b52-4e04-baca-5efa5567645d.jpg?v=1787927985","url":"https:\/\/shop.queerbooks.com\/products\/bastards","provider":"Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni's Room","version":"1.0","type":"link"}