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Book Cover for: O Fallen Angel, Kate Zambreno

O Fallen Angel

Kate Zambreno

"Delirious, uncanny, the tragedy is ecstatic, each sentence pushes you to the next, each chapter to the following. This is the page-turner of experimental work." --The Paris Review

"A brilliant, hilarious debut." --Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

The haunting debut novel that put Kate Zambreno on the map, O Fallen Angel, is a provocative, voice-driven story of a family in crisis--and, more broadly, the crisis of the American family--now repackaged and with a new introduction by Lidia Yuknavitch.

Inspired by Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Kate Zambreno's brilliant novel is a triptych of modern-day America set in a banal Midwestern landscape, told from three distinct, unforgettable points of view.

There is "Mommy," a portrait of housewife psychosis, fenced in by her own small mind. There is "Maggie," Mommy's unfortunate daughter whom she infects with fairytales. Then there is the mysterious martyr-figure Malachi, a Cassandra in army fatigues, the Septimus Smith to Mommy's Mrs. Dalloway, who stands at the foot of the highway holding signs of fervent prophecy, gaping at the bottomless abyss of the human condition, while SUVs scream past.

Deeply poignant, sometimes hilarious, and other times horrifying, O Fallen Angel is satire at its best.


Book Details

  • Publisher: Harper Perennial
  • Publish Date: Jan 17th, 2017
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.10in - 4.90in - 0.70in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9780062572684
  • Categories: LiteraryFamily Life - GeneralDystopian

About the Author

Zambreno, Kate: -

Kate Zambreno is also the author of two novels and three books of nonfiction. She lives in New York and teaches writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Yuknavitch, Lidia: -

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she also teaches Women's Studies, Film Studies, Writing, and Literature. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

Praise for this book

"Embracing the didactic language of parable while turning it on its head, Zambreno's punchy, matter-of-fact, repetitive sentences belie repressed emotional truths... The effect is a poetic visit to Middle America, one that's more likely to expose hypocrisies than generate empathy." - Huffington Post, Book of the Week
"Delirious, uncanny, the tragedy is ecstatic, each sentence pushes you to the next, each chapter to the following. This is the page-turner of experimental work." - The Paris Review
"The book is visceral and astonishing-there are not many writers like Zambreno out there." - Bookriot
"Reading Kate Zambreno's first novel... is like getting a dose of electroshock therapy-a galvanizing current of electricity straight into the brain... O Fallen Angelis blackly funny and brutal, a radical and clear-sighted antidote for banality and complacency. " - Staff Picks, Paris Review
"... the timing of O Fallen Angel's re-release fuckedly transitions it from Sad Girl Cult Classic to Great American Novel in écriture féminine." - Sam Cohen, Weird Sister
"But for all its dank humor and brutal dissection of the nuclear family, O Fallen Angel is also a philosophical novel, deeply concerned with the problem of freedom." - Electric Literature
"In Zambreno's vision, Trumpism is a disease that's intertwined with a quintessential American illness, both mental and physical, and a denial of corporeal reality-sex and death in particular-at its root. (I recommend it thoroughly)." - Flavorwire
"Zambreno isn't writing to change your life, and she isn't writing to revolutionize the plight of women. She is writing to change the way you experience a story. She is writing to hit you in the gut in the very best way." - Chicago Review of Books
"Kate Zambreno goes for the throat. Or, at least, her language does. Her debut novel, O Fallen Angel, (which won the Chiasmus Press 'Undoing the Novel' contest) arrives in the grand spirit of Acker, Artaud, Burroughs, but where these are A and A and B, Kate is Z in full: her own, slick, squealy, and of another light." - Blake Butler
"O Fallen Angel is absolutely fearless, and, in its way, it is devilishly fun." - Adam Novy, Dossier journal
"Haunting and visionary, Kate Zambreno's O Fallen Angel examines the suburban family with ruthless elegance. Here is a novel, done and undone, a brazen mirror reflecting the 21st century." - Lily Hoang
"Kathy Acker would be proud." - Karen Finley
"To try and pin a storyline to this novel wouldn't do it justice. Rather, it exposes the everyday life of most contemporary American families, except that day-to-day activities have been replaced with the semiotic...Linguistically enthralling, this is a novel that will surely make you orbit into the ineffable." - Kirkus
"It's how you feel at your worst moments; it's less a book than a Molotov cocktail of a story. It will make you think of Acker, sure, but it's a different angel with a different harp. It's something only Kate Zambreno could have done, and it's brave and scared and indispensable." - Michael Schaub, Bookslut
"Like Angela Carter's fairy tales, Kate Zambreno's O Fallen Angel deftly exposes the psychic brutality that lies underneath the smooth glassy surface of parable. Set in Midwestern America in approximately 2006, Zambreno s character/archetypes a Mommy who names her golden retriever after Scott Peterson's murdered wife Laci, a daughter who signs her suicide note with a smiley face and a doomed psychotic prophet are all agents and victims of disinformation, but this doesn't make their pain any less real. In Zambreno s suv-era America, unhappiness doesn't exist because it can be broken down into treatable diagnostic codes. As she writes, Maggie wants to be free but she also wants to be loved and these are polar instincts, which is why she is bipolar, which is a malady of mood. A brilliant, hilarious debut." - Chris Kraus