Upright Beasts, Coffee House Press 2015
Buy at Powell’s, Amazon, Coffee House Press, or your local bookstore.
Twenty-one genre-bending stories of bestial transformation, accidental murder, erotically-challenged dictatorship, and other tales of darkness, absurdity, and confusion.
“In Upright Beasts, Lincoln Michel uses the unreal and the surreal in ways that allow his readers to understand something about the human condition. Who are we when someone allows us to see ourselves more clearly? We are pitiful, ridiculous, beautiful, sometimes brave and sometimes cowards, but always—in these stories—illuminated.”—Kelly Link
“These stories are mighty surrealist wonders, mordantly funny and fiercely intelligent, and Lincoln Michel is a writer that will leave you in awe.”—Laura van den Berg
“Lincoln Michel has created a sinister landscape that feels at once uncomfortably familiar and yet truly strange. This is the post-pastoral as creeping horror story—a kind of secret, alternate history of a forgotten America, a country of half-dead towns and empty streets. There are welcome echoes of Barthelme and others in here, but Michel’s voice carries through, darkly intelligent and unmistakably original. A tremendous debut.”—Charles Yu
“Lincoln Michel’s stories are strange, haunting and often very funny beasts. His prose is rich and also spare. He can kill you in two pages or take you for a long, dangerous, kooky ride—and then kill you. And by kill you, I mean thrill you. Savor this book and welcome Mr. Michel.”—Sam Lipsyte
“Deadpan and life affirming, the stories in this genre-bending debut veer from an apartment complex for the suicidal to a ghostly artists’ colony to the innards of wild things.”—O Magazine
“The world presented in Michel’s admirable debut collection is similar to our own, yet twisted just enough to feel strange. . . Michel frequently knocks his brief bursts of prose out of the park.”—Publishers Weekly
“[Upright Beasts] reminded me of the absolute wonder great fiction creates”—Roxane Gay
LINCOLN MICHEL 