Readings at Parkside:  
Nate Lippens 

The Parkside Lounge
317 East Houston Street
New York City
Tuesday, October 20th, 7:30pm

Sliding scale tickets are available HERE!

Please join us to celebrate Bastards, the conclusion to Nate Lippens’ Wisconsin trilogy ~ a book of losses, memories, and survival. 

This event will feature a reading followed by a conversation between Nate & Wayne Koestenbaum.

Bastards is published by Semiotext(e) and Pilot Press (UK).



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. 

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.

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 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.

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.

“I can't say enough about how good Nate Lippens's books are”  —Gary Indiana

“Nate Lippens is a true blue radical queer. Bastards is a spiralling trip through the less canonized parts of our history.” —Nicole Eisenman

“A new punk: in Bastards, Nate Lippens gives us 21st century No Future, hardcore queer and real. It’s hilarious, it’s devastating, and it shows what is at stake in just trying to live.” —Charlie Porter

“Nate Lippens is a brilliant writer, and a much-needed voice among the new crop of queer novelists. His portrayals of working-class queers, ex-members of the queercore movement, recovering addicts, and artists, feels new, though somehow also a part of a nearly lost family of queer thinkers: the writers and artists his characters still cherish.” —Chicago Review of Books

“His bracing novels represent an honest reckoning with the post-AIDS era and its effect on life and imagination.” —The Nation

“What a gift to encounter such intelligent homosexuality!” —Robert Glück

Nate Lippens is the author of the novels My Dead Book, a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Ripcord, a New Statesman Book of the Year, all published by Semiotext(e) and Pilot Press (UK). He co-authored Box Office Poison with Matthew Kinlin, which was published by Future Tense Books. His fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Sluts, edited by Michelle Tea and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles.



Wayne Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.  His many books span poetry, essays, biography, and fiction.  The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award, he has also been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.  A widely shown painter, he released his first piano/vocal album, Lounge Act, in 2017. He lives in New York.