Bastards, forthcoming from Pilot Press (September 2026) marks the conclusion of author Nate Lippens’ Wisconsin Trilogy, a series of novels including Ripcord and My Dead Book. Each explores aspects of working-class gay life, with Lippens’ nonlinear style carrying forth themes of loss, ageing, love, friendship, the impact of AIDS, and survival.
Bastards follows its narrator, a gay Wisconsinite in his 50s who has recently emerged from a stint in a psychiatric ward, working out what it means to “perform at being a person”. Like previous instalments, it is written in vignettes that alternate between present happenings, memories of friends and lovers, scathing observations, and invocations of figures past and present such as David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, and Lady Bunny.
We spoke to Nate ahead of this hotly anticipated release to delve into his writing process and learn more about the context and creative force behind Bastards.
Will Aghoghogbe (PKB): With Bastards, we have arrived at the final book in your “Wisconsin Trilogy”. Now that the three have been released, could you reintroduce us to the series? I'm interested in hearing about the ways they are in conversation, or how they may work together as one, given that they share many themes and characters.
Nate Lippens: Each book stands on its own but as a triad or trilogy they echo each other and accrue into a portrait of survival and friendship. My Dead Book follows a working-class gay man who’s approaching his fiftieth birthday and is suffering from insomnia. He’s revisiting memories of friends and lovers who died, some from AIDS, some from addiction, some from depression. Ripcord picks up a few years later and introduces his artist and writer friends in Milwaukee where he bartends and is having a doomed affair with a younger married man. In Bastards he’s mourning the death of his good friend Rudy who was his main connection since he was a throwaway teenager and he’s navigating the increasingly hostile world that has abandoned any semblance of caring for anyone.
WA: Your writing has consistently pushed against the ‘traditional’ form of the novel. What particularly stood out to me when reading Bastards was your mastery of writing in vignettes. As a reader, I felt myself drawn into this fragmented world in which tender anecdotes and memories merged into radical politics, romance, longing, wit… As the writing stopped and started, I could perceive gaps forming where other novelists may have inserted context or other connective-tissues. For me, the result was a work that felt entirely unconcerned with justifying itself, or making its story legible to a wider, or ‘mainstream’ society. I’d like to hear more about your process and motivation behind writing in vignettes in this way.
NL: I’m kind of allergic to explanations or things being tied up too neatly. That’s not how I experience life at all. I come from a poetry background, but I worked as a music writer and an art critic in my twenties and thirties too. I found the utility of arts journalism frustrating. When I returned to fiction, I was still stuck in the mindset of the 19th-century novel. A lot of moving people from room to room and exposition. Very labored. Once I abandoned that type of writing, I could see what I needed to do. I looked to books I’d loved like Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Pitch Dark, E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, Jules Renard’s journals, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and drew much more from my notebooks. My Dead Book was originally twice as long with maybe a quarter of the impact. I’m a ruthless self-editor. I think the effect is probably closer to my poems, which stray closer to prose. Working with vignettes and epigrams is mostly about juxtaposition of tone. You have to build tension in other ways than plot.
WA: Following from this idea, it seems as though another important aspect of Bastards is its resistance against the commodification of queer expression. It does not follow a sanitised or gentrified account of marginalised life. Could you speak about this experience from the perspective of your writing as we continue to see the rapid change in the meaning and practice of queerness as an identity?
NL: My characters are working-class and struggling to get by. They bartend, clean houses, cater. They’re middle-aged and living in the Midwest and their young lives were shaped by homophobia, and they’ve lived in the long shadow of that. I try to be as accurate and honest portraying those experiences as I can. It would be dishonest to tidy it up or try to translate it into something palatable. Unfortunately, I think queer expression has been thoroughly commodified at this point. The radical 1990’s roots of the word—reclaiming a slur and politicizing it through direct action of Queer Nation—and even the openness of a few years ago have been completely submerged in consumerism and conformity. When Sam Altman is called “a prominent queer business leader” without irony, that’s a wrap. Weirdly, I’ve also experienced an uptick of people who call themselves queer being really homophobic. So, I’ve sort of left the field. My friends and I half-jokingly call each other faguettes and I now bill my writing as homosexual fictions.
WA: As The Nation put it, your novels reckon with the state of life and imagination in the post-AIDS era. The experience of great loss persists through the Wisconsin Trilogy, but so too does survival and resistance. Bastards is full of residue and recurrences, and its nonlinearity seems to confound any sense of before- and after. As such, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this, and on the notion of “post-AIDS” as a way to describe our time.
NL: I know they meant that we’re not in the death sentence terror years of AIDS, but I don’t believe we’re post-AIDS. “Post-AIDS” in the United States mostly means manageable in pharmaceutical and medical terms. Of course, for people I know who’ve been HIV+ since the ‘80s and ‘90s, that’s been dependent on medication and insurance and qualifying for government assistance, which has byzantine rules. It’s a full-time job managing their health. And most of that is being gutted by the government, which decimated USAID abroad, and social programs at home. I’m one of the estimated five million Americans who will lose their health insurance at the end of 2026. I know everyone loves to get lost in the weeds of internet semantics and the team sports mentality of party politics, but I’ll just say fascism is too kind of a word for what we’re experiencing.
I think for my generation and much more so the generation ahead of mine, the deaths of so many from AIDS and also the designed incompetence and cruelty by the government and the demented hatred by Christians permanently altered everything. There was the loss of lives and the searing, overwhelming grief and there was also the way for many of us it absolutely destroyed our belief and participation in any institutions and so-called public life. The resilience and survival of the characters in the books is a result of the anarcho-homo Bartleby refusal and rooted in their friendships, which are often rancorous and full of miscommunications and misunderstandings but also deep love and respect. And they all love art and music and books. They’re cultured despite the culture discarding them.
WA: Finally, Bastards ends with a “thank you”, in a way that seems to both signal to the reader and the narrator permission to conclude the writing. It felt, to me, to be a poignant ending that generously granted me the agency to finish, or (without spoiling), watch the stage curtains close and start to clap. I certainly felt like clapping! It also left me wanting more, and to flip the book and start again. So, I’ll use this comment to ask about any further projects you may have on the way…
NL: Thank you! I have a novel I co-wrote with Matthew Kinlin called Box Office Poison that will be published in the U.S. in the spring. It’s about a ghostwriter and the two aging cult actresses he knew in the late 1970s, told through letters, notes, and interviews. I’m working on two novels now and kind of seeing which one takes the lead and grabs my attention. One is about an aging cult writer suffering from creative block and vertigo who is concerned about the disappearance of his younger bipolar friend. The other is about a man in his thirties whose marriage to an older artist has ended, which has returned him back to a life of service jobs and bad apartment-living and experimenting with analog real-life park cruising. Invariably, they’ll change a lot from conception to completion. I may just have to flip a coin and commit. I also have a book of short prose and poetry that’s my crumpled homosexual valentine to the Black Sparrow Press and City Lights books I grew up on.
Bastards, by Nate Lippens, is forthcoming September 2026 from Pilot Press.