Description

In this reissue of her debut collection, Madeline Cash, the author of Lost Lambs, skewers our late-stage-Capitalist reality into a strange, but ultimately life-affirming collage of stories.

Life is absurd, so is Earth Angel.

A biblical plague rains sentient frogs, a childless millennial throws a slumber party, a young couple try experimental drugs to reignite their relationship. Tales of rebellious school girls and apocalypse-fearing marketing executives.

Blending reverence and ridicule, the stories that make up Earth Angel are bizarre, playful, inextricably linked, hyper-modern yet timeless. What shines through is Cash’s undeniable affection for the denizens of this strange and surreal world – a place that is at times dark, but not without hope for the future.

Publisher Review

An emerging writer to watch * Washington Post * Cash's stories can be funny, inventive, linguistically exciting, and feel genuinely new. The brutality they trade on conjures depressingly convincing portraits of our ongoing modernity, realer than real * Verso Books * Cash's heroines are all earth angels but none so much as presence in these stories of the author herself, whose style has a devilish (remember Satan was an angel) and celestial powers, quite apart from the characters and scenarios Cash has imagined. * Bomb Magazine * Cash's stories are a reminder of what fiction can do when it's allowed to break the rules, express its moment, turn the despairing or the banal into something better. * Compact * The stories in [Cash's] book are bizarre in the way that only a writer with her precision can employ. * W Magazine * Madeline's debut story collection reads like a captivating lucid dream. * Nylon * Uncanny, poetic, and bleakly funny, Earth Angel reaches for a higher power in a society that has forgotten how to believe. * LARB * [Cash] pushes her characters a step further than expected, hooks them up to an IV filled with irony, and watches as they degrade on their own slippery slopes. * NorthWest Review * To read Madeline Cash is to mainline her apocalyptic vitality, to witness a rare vision realized with an untamed sense of control, to light your cigarette off of the flames from her burning heart. * Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost * I enjoyed Madeline's stories a lot. They're weird and funny and dead-pan, and they explore interesting, under-examined topics. * Tao Lin, author of Taipei and Leave Society *