Upright Beasts
(Adobe EPUB eBook, OverDrive Read)
Praise for Lincoln Michel:
"Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources."—Justin Taylor, Vice
Time passes unexpectedly or, perhaps, inexactly at the school. It's hard to remember what semester we are supposed to be in. Several of the clocks still operate, but they don't show the same time. The red bells, affixed in every room, erupt several times each day, yet the intervals between the disruptions wax and wane with an unknown algorithm. The windows are obscured by construction paper murals. Consequently, the sun rises and falls in complete ignorance of those of us attending the school. Many of us participated in the decorations in some lost point of childhood. A few of us still have dried glue under our fingernails.
In the room I sit in now, the windows are covered with a glitter and glue reenactment of the colonization of Roanoke by Sir Walter Raleigh. Outside of the window, who knows?
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 work has appeared in BOMB, Oxford American, Tin House, the Believer, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. A founding editor of the literary magazine Gigantic, Michel also serves as an online editor for Electric Literature.
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Lincoln Michel. (2015). Upright Beasts. Coffee House Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Lincoln Michel. 2015. Upright Beasts. Coffee House Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Lincoln Michel, Upright Beasts. Coffee House Press, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Lincoln Michel. Upright Beasts. Coffee House Press, 2015.
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Lincoln Michel is the online editor of Electric Literature and the coeditor of Gigantic. His work has appeared in Tin House, NOON, the Believer, American Short Fiction, Pushcart Prize XXXIX, and elsewhere. He was born in Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Praise for Lincoln Michel:
"Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources."—Justin Taylor, Vice
Time passes unexpectedly or, perhaps, inexactly at the school. It's hard to remember what semester we are supposed to be in. Several of the clocks still operate, but they don't show the same time. The red bells, affixed in every room, erupt several times each day, yet the intervals between the disruptions wax and wane with an unknown algorithm. The windows are obscured by construction paper murals. Consequently, the sun rises and falls in complete ignorance of those of us attending the school. Many of us participated in the decorations in some lost point of childhood. A few of us still have dried glue under our fingernails.
In the room I sit in now, the windows are covered with a glitter and glue reenactment of the colonization of Roanoke by Sir Walter Raleigh. Outside of the window, who knows?
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 work has appeared in BOMB, Oxford American, Tin House, the Believer, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. A founding editor of the literary magazine Gigantic, Michel also serves as an online editor for Electric Literature.
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- content: "Lincoln Michel is a master of where literary culture and the internet meet. His recent collection of funny, dark short stories, Upright Beasts, similarly blends worlds and bend rules."
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August 17, 2015
The world presented in Michel’s admirable debut collection is similar to our own, yet twisted just enough to feel strange. Here, so-called Apartment Wellness workers wander hallways to prevent suicides, children grow up in environs reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls (a room inside a room inside a room), and weather vanes set off neighborhood warfare. Schools play a role in two tales: the excellent “Our Education” presents a Lord of the Flies–esque narrative, with children surviving inside a school after an unexplained apocalyptic event wipes out adults; “Almost Recess” finds a teacher corralling students who play-act hangings in her classroom. Other stories feature a secretive artists’ colony (“Colony”) and a mysterious death (“Things Left Outside”). Some of his longer tales lose momentum: “Our New Neighborhood” pushes quirkiness to a cloying extreme, and “Dark Air,” the collection’s longest story, full of backwoods aliens, mutations, and giant creatures, feels like an undercooked B movie. But most of these stories are quite short, and Michel frequently knocks his brief bursts of prose out of the park.
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August 1, 2015
Michel, an editor at Gigantic and Electric Literature, makes his fiction debut with a collection of stories-all restrained, all strange. In this book, you get 25 stories in 216 pages-not a bad deal. Michel opens with "Our Education," which has this offhanded mention on its second page: "There is an ongoing fire in the back corner of the cafeteria." The surrealism is introduced without any underlining, setting the tone for not only this story, but for the book as a whole. Soon, it becomes clear that the teachers have vanished, but Michel is interested in mystery, not answers. The word "elliptical" was invented for tales like these, most of which are set in mundane suburban spaces in which people "feel detached from their surroundings." Some of the stories are remarkable-and no surprise, they tend to be the longer ones: "Some Notes on My Brother's Brief Travels" leaves an impression with its dancing man dressed like a chicken, an image both absurd and lonely. "Things Left Outside" feels like an update of Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home," with violence creeping into domesticity. "Halfway Home to Somewhere Else," the best story here, involves a grown man's conflicts with a group of teenagers at a swimming hole. Michel knows the right authors to mimic, and his stories take cues from Barthelme and Aimee Bender in addition to Carver...but then, what stories by an emerging writer don't these days? For all the book's quirkiness, the cumulative effect is somewhat familiar, like a piece of boxy IKEA furniture anyone can build as long as they follow the instructions, and too many of Michel's shorter pieces are forgettable, lacking enough substance to become truly haunting; they feel as lightweight as paper airplanes, taken away by the wind before reaching any destination. A strong debut despite its unevenness.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Praise for Lincoln Michel:
"Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources."—Justin Taylor, Vice
Time passes unexpectedly or, perhaps, inexactly at the school. It's hard to remember what semester we are supposed to be in. Several of the clocks still operate, but they don't show the same time. The red bells, affixed in every room, erupt several times each day, yet the intervals between the disruptions wax and wane with an unknown algorithm. The windows are obscured by construction paper murals. Consequently, the sun rises and falls in complete ignorance of those of us attending the school. Many of us participated in the decorations in some lost point of childhood. A few of us still have dried glue under our fingernails.
In the room I sit in now, the windows are covered with a glitter and glue reenactment of the colonization of Roanoke by Sir Walter Raleigh. Outside of the window, who...
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UPRIGHT BEASTS
Our Education
If It Were Anyone Else
The River Trick
The Room inside My Father's Room
Little Girls by the Side of the Pool
Everybody Who's Anybody
Colony
New Game
Our New Neighborhood
NORTH AMERICAN MAMMALS
The Deer in Virginia
Filling Pools
Hike
Drive
Halfway Home to Somewhere Else
Some Notes on My Brother's Brief Travels
What You Need to Know about the Weathervane
Things Left Outside
FAMILIAR CREATURES
Lawn Dad
The Mayor's Plan
Whale Belly
And That Is How They Found Me
The Soldier
The Head Bodyguard Holds His Head in His Hands
Routine
My Life in the Bellies of Beasts
MEGAFAUNA
What We Have Surmised about the John Adams Incarnation
Dark Air
Getting There Nonetheless
A Note on the Type- bisacCodes
- code: FIC029000
- description: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)
