Bliss Montage: Stories

by Ling Ma

Overview

A National Indie Bestseller

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize

A Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Houston Chronicle, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Mashable, Polygon, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice

“Uncanny and haunting . . . Genius.” —Michele Filgate, The Washington Post

“Dazzling.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250893543
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	40,363
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Chicago with her family.

Table of Contents

Los Angeles

Oranges

G

Yeti Lovemaking

Returning

Office Hours

Peking Duck

Tomorrow

Editorial Reviews

06/27/2022

Ma (Severance) examines themes of otherness and disconnection in this fantastical and often brilliant collection. In “Tomorrow,” an arm protrudes from a woman’s vagina during her pregnancy, which her doctor says is “not ideal” but “relatively safe,” his cursory advice gleaned from a website that “looks like WebMD.” The mother, like many of the book’s protagonists, emigrated from China to the U.S. as a child; later in the story, she returns to visit her great-aunt, with whom she communicates primarily through a translation app. In “Returning,” a woman travels with her husband to his native country, the fictional Garboza, only to be abandoned by him at the airport. The protagonist, who wrote a novel about a couple who “during an economic depression, decide to cryogenically freeze themselves,” experiences ambivalence about her marriage. These stories, and the elliptical “Office Hours” (about a young woman’s semi-romance with her film professor, who has a Narnia-like magical wardrobe in his office), are enchanting, full of intelligence, dry humor, and an appealing self-awareness. On the other hand, a couple of entries—such as “Los Angeles,” about a woman living with 100 of her ex-boyfriends—don’t quite manifest into something more than their conceit. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Named a Must Read by The New York Times, TIME, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Esquire, Nylon, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Gothamist, Associated Press, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, The Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Book Riot, Pop Sugar, Polygon, Tordotcom, and Nuvo

“Ma’s stories stay with you . . . Evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility.”

—Lovia Gyarkye, The New York Times Book Review

“Weird and wonderful, surreal and subversive . . . Ma is well on her way to a landmark career.”

—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“Remarkable . . . Bliss Montage delivers on the white-hot promise of [Ma’s] 2018 breakout.”

—Christopher Borrelli, The Chicago Tribune

“Surreal . . . Powerhouse [stories] so absorbing that you’ll pray Ma spins them off into future novels.”

—Hillary Kelly, Los Angeles Times

“A joy to read . . . Dark and fantastic and very, very true.”

—Abby Manzella, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Captivating . . . Ma harnesses the pulsating desire and power dynamics present in all relationships, from intimate friendships and haunting romantic entanglements to motherhood and the invisible yet omnipresent ties of ancestors.”

—Cady Lang and Angela Haupt, TIME

“Swift, smart . . . As always, Ling Ma’s big, weird ideas set the stage for keen emotional insights.”

—Patrick Rapa, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“By turns blunt . . . hilarious . . . and insanely clever.”

—J. Howard Rosier, Vulture

“Wildly inventive . . . The tension between the familiar and the unfathomable pulses on every page.”

—Lauren Mechling, Vogue

“[Bliss Montage] destabilizes easy expectations—around speculative literature, Asian American literature, immigrant literature, trauma literature, and fiction itself—to gratifying effect . . . Disquieting and sometimes delightful.”

—Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard, The Nation

“A surreal and unnerving collection of stories that explores the nature of connection and autonomy.”

—The New Yorker

“You turn the pages of Bliss Montage . . . and find the world you thought you knew shaken up and rearranged . . . Told with what’s become [Ma’s] signature sting of wit and satire.”

—Scott Simon, NPR

“Each story unspools like a dream sequence privately remembered . . . What’s so satisfying about Ma’s second act [is] how Bliss Montage picks up the thread left by Severance’s coming-of-age arc into these stories of older, hardened women, who’ve already confronted their pasts over and over, who now find relief—and rebellion—via dissociation.”

—Delia Cai, Vanity Fair

“When I finished reading Bliss Montage . . . I wanted to turn back to the first page and read the collection all over again.”

—Kathy Chow, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Darkly comic, linguistically sharp, and uniquely harrowing in how it straddles the line between reality and fable.”

—J. Howard Rosier, Houston Chronicle

“Strange and unsettling . . . There’s a bit of magic realism in Ma’s imaginings, a bit of horror and often an emotional distancing.”

—Allison Arieff, San Francisco Chronicle

“Ma offers an astute insider-outsider perspective and a sharp eye for detail . . . [Bliss Montage] tweak[s] the everyday to allow us to question the mirages scaffolding our reality.”

—Mia Levitin, Financial Times

“Far-out stories . . . each one its own deadpan flight of fancy, sly and strange.”

—Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

“As outlandish as [it is] delectable.”

—Sophia June, Nylon

“Uncanny and powerful . . . Soaring . . . Brilliantly layered.”

—Bruna Dantas Lobato, Astra

From the Publisher

★ 10/07/2022

NYPL Young Lion Ma (Severance) reveals the absurdity of the everyday through push-the-envelope stories that feel weird and disturbing, perhaps self-consciously so, until the reader surrenders to their sensibility and decides that they're brilliant. A woman lives in a large compound with her husband and all her former boyfriends; one runs off, hunted by the police, and in a follow-up story the protagonist spots him on the street, follows him, and reveals startling truths about him to his suddenly anxious new lover. A young woman on the verge of a new life has a last-minute visit with a friend she hasn't seen for some time, as they have little in common and mostly bonded over a drug they once took together; the power play here is as scary as it is absolute. In a story of marital tension that forces us to ponder how well we know the people to whom we're closest, a wife travels with her husband to his homeland, the backwater Garbosa, and learns that the festival he wants to attend involves burying oneself alive as a means of renewal. Throughout, the surreal prickles the skin but starts to feel almost welcomingly familiar. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers looking for an inventive take on contemporary life.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal

Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection. Embodying the detached storyteller, Chin allows the strangeness of the eight stories to pull listeners in and keep them intrigued. Blending fantastical elements and absurdity, the stories include “Los Angeles,” about a woman who lives with her 100 ex-boyfriends and a husband, and “Tomorrow,” in which a pregnant woman has an arm protruding and growing from her vagina. Woven into these unusual works are explorations of the immigrant experience, loneliness, relationships, and more. Reverb effects are utilized throughout, enhancing the haunting, surreal effect of the stories. The result is a memorable, thought-provoking collection. V.T.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection. Embodying the detached storyteller, Chin allows the strangeness of the eight stories to pull listeners in and keep them intrigued. Blending fantastical elements and absurdity, the stories include “Los Angeles,” about a woman who lives with her 100 ex-boyfriends and a husband, and “Tomorrow,” in which a pregnant woman has an arm protruding and growing from her vagina. Woven into these unusual works are explorations of the immigrant experience, loneliness, relationships, and more. Reverb effects are utilized throughout, enhancing the haunting, surreal effect of the stories. The result is a memorable, thought-provoking collection. V.T.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

★ 2022-06-08
Short stories from the author of Severance, winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction.

The narrator of “Los Angeles” lives with her husband, their children, and the children’s au pairs in the east and west wings of their home. Her hundred ex-boyfriends live in the “largest but ugliest wing.” While the narrator takes these past lovers on outings to Moon Juice and LACMA, the husband works at an investment firm. The husband’s dialogue is rendered in dollar signs. This piece feels uncanny in the Freudian sense—as if it is peopled not by actual humans but by ghosts or automata. (There are echoes of Ma’s debut novel, in which a pandemic turns people into zombies that repeat the same everyday action over and over.) In the stories that follow, Ma uses elements of the fantastic but grounds them in a reality that is more recognizably our own. “Without question, the best part of taking G is the beginning. The sensation of invisibility is one of floating. You walk around with a lesser gravity, a low-helium balloon the day after a birthday party.” “G” is the name of a story and the name of the drug the narrator of the story takes with her best friend, Bonnie, on her last night in New York. What begins as a tale about two young women engaging in low-key mayhem because no one can see them turns into a story about two girls who were pressured to become friends because they were both Chinese immigrants—although with very dissimilar experiences of life in the United States. What they want from invisibility is different, and what Bonnie wants from the friend who is about to leave her is everything. The ideas of home and belonging recur throughout the collection. In “Returning,” the narrator meets the man who will become her husband when they are both on a panel for immigrant authors. A trip to his native country to participate in a festival—a trip that is an attempt to salvage their marriage—ends in a macabre, desperate rite. Ma also writes about motherhood and academic life and abusive relationships. These are rich themes, and the author explores them with the logic of dreams.

Haunting and artful.

Kirkus Reviews