“There’s a mood, like an energy that I feel it’s faithful to that time that I like.” “Even though there’s no scene in Severance that’s directly from my life, when I open it up, and I read maybe a paragraph, I feel like I’m back to my mid-late twenties,” Ma said. Set in a 2011 apocalyptic New York ravaged by a fictional Shen Fever, Ma managed to capture overwhelming societal collapse in her own darkly satirical way-of late-stage capitalism, immigration and alienation from one’s home, and harmless zombies doomed to repeat their same old routines until they perish. Published in 2018, Severance was lauded as the coronavirus novel come early. The abnormal becomes normal-for as repeated by one of the characters in her stories, “it is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.”īliss Montage is Ma’s second book following the publication of her debut science-fiction novel Severance, a coming-of-age novel following millennial office worker Candace Chen through the apocalypse.

Its characters inhabit the normalcy of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, DC, Utah, a fictional, post-communist country named Garboza, and a United States so far deteriorated that migrants no longer rush its borders and its founding artifacts are on loan to foreign museums. In Bliss Montage, the surreal often bleeds into the familiar. A lonely government employee finds a small baby’s arm protruding out from inside her-a rather normal, if uncanny birth defect in the United States these days. A soon-to-be film student takes invisibility drugs with her childhood friend, wreaking havoc in New York for the last time.

A listless housewife keeps her one-hundred ex-boyfriends housed in her Los Angeles mega-mansion even as her life has moved on without them.

The eight stories that make up the collection follow intimate, confessional protagonists and absurdist fantasies carried to their conclusion.įrom toxic friendships, abusive relationships, and vacations to an unfamiliar homeland, Ma takes familiar situations and pushes them to their extremes. Ling Ma’s latest short story collection Bliss Montage is a fever dream where the real and surreal have merged into one.

Bliss montage stories