Praise for Lincoln Michel: "Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources." — Justin Taylor, Vice "Weird, darkly funny stories…Michel ably handles modes from lyrical to ironic.” — New York Times Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. In these short stories, we are the upright beasts, doing battle with our darker, weirder impulses as the world collapses around us. “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 “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 “Many first books carry the suggestion of promise, of wonderful things to come, but it is most unusual to encounter a debut as agile and assured and utterly dazzling as Upright Beasts. 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 “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 “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