Bliss Montage

Bliss Montage / Ling Ma / MacMillan, September 13, 2022 - $26 (Hardcover)

Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage, a collection of eight short stories, is a fever dream spun into reality. From a house with 100 ex-boyfriends to an invisibility drug to a baby’s arm that grows outside of the womb, Ma’s images compose a not-so-blissful montage of worst nightmares and intrusive thoughts. Superimposing the realistic and the bizarre, Ma, author of the 2018 novel Severance, revels unabashedly in the peculiarity of what it means to live in today’s world.

Each story exists in a separate liminal space, hosting its own cast of characters and fantastical elements. “G,” the story of the invisibility drug, for instance, features two codependent best friends living in “an invisibility cocoon” in the Upper West Side. “Office Hours” takes place within a magical office on a university campus and philosophically explores the protagonist’s growth into adulthood, while “Peking Duck” and “Tomorrow” investigate the emotional and linguistic challenges emerging at the crossroads between home country and new city.

Oddity is Ma’s artistic weapon. Defamiliarizing everyday experience through separate and fantastical tales, Ma forces readers back into their daily lives with fresh eyes. In probing themes of intimacy, memory, immigration, isolation and urbanity, her authorial voice reverberates, honest and inquiring: “To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time” and “Were we processing trauma or were we simply re-experiencing it?” Ultimately, it is this deft coexistence of the fantastical and realistic, bizarre and normal that brings readers closest to the complexities of our contemporary existence.

--Neena Dzur