- Ma, Ling
Bliss Montage: Stories
A National Indie Bestseller
A Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
“Dazzling.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Uncanny and haunting . . . Genius.” —Michele Filgate, The Washington Post
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.
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.