[Launch] Bastards by Nate Lippens

We are excited to welcome you for the launch of Bastards (Pilot Press, 2026) by Nate Lippens. The novel concludes the author's 'Wisconsin Trilogy' - a series including Ripcord and My Dead Book. The trilogy explores working-class gay life, paying attention to the impacts of AIDS, questions of aging and survival, alongside themes of love and loss. Nate will join us for a reading, after which he will be in conversation with poet Obe Alkema.

Find Nate's books here: https://rile.space/authors/nate-lippens

Schedule

17:00 Introduction by Richard Porter (Pilot Press)
17:10 Reading by Nate Lippens
17:40 Conversation between Nate Lippens and Obe Alkema

About Bastards

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.

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

Obe Alkema is a poet based in The Netherlands. He debuted with Obelisque (2018), a poetry glossy in millennial pink, followed up by another Obelisque in 2022. His 2024 publication Bewogen Selfies is a collection of memoirs about New York, poet Kevin Killian and New Narrative, sex and sexuality, Italy, depression and therapy, and much more. He regularly reviews poetry collections for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and works for the municipality of Utrecht.