O Fallen Angel

Originally published by Chiasmus Press

Reissued by Harper Perennial, 2017

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 with a new introduction by original publisher 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.

“There is no other writer on the planet like Kate Zambreno. She is singular inside language and she rearranges it enough to undo all of signification. Not even Stein, or Woolf, or Acker ever risked as much on the page. My entire adult life, I have waited for novels that make me feel like something radical has happened to me. The occurrence is rare; most novels make me feel like something I’ve already felt for too long. Sometimes I feel an American shame for what novels have become. I lose hope. When that happens, I return to Kate’s novels and reread. Every single time something else explodes on the page as well as in my body. Bomblettes across the territory or art, interrupting our mindless consumer existences, reminding us that we are alive and in relation to language.” — from introduction by Lidia Yuknavitch

"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

"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

“... 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

“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

“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

“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

“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.” — Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

“The book is visceral and astonishing-there are not many writers like Zambreno out there.” — Bookriot

“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.” — Yelena Moscovitch, The Paris Review