{"product_id":"bastards","title":"Bastards","description":"\u003cp class=\"book-summary\"\u003e\u003cem\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\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eYou 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\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRecently sprung from a stint on a psychiatric ward, the narrator of \u003cem\u003eBastards\u003c\/em\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 \u003cem\u003equeer\u003c\/em\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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"book-summary\"\u003eThe conclusion to Nate Lippens' Wisconsin trilogy: a book of losses, memories, and survival.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e [publisher's note]∏\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Pilot Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57358369227092,"sku":"A8B-37952","price":15.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1072\/9609\/6596\/files\/Bastard.jpg?v=1790814997","url":"https:\/\/after8books.com\/products\/bastards","provider":"After 8 Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}