Bliss Montage: Stories

"Weird and wonderful, surreal & subversive, these stories prove that Ma is well on her way to a landmark career."  —  Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness & reality of our collective delusions: love & loneliness, connection & 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 & the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, & heartbreakingly alike.

“The deadpan tone of [the] narrator’s voice implicitly urges readers to ‘just roll with it’ and so we do … Nothing is just one thing in Ma’s writing: Satire swirls into savagery; a gimmicky premise into poignancy … Every one of these eight stories ventures out of familiar situations into the weird … All of the stories in Bliss Montage are haunting; none are didactic. Ling Ma writes with such authority that we readers are simply swept along, like that professor, through the portal. If sometimes we wonder where we’ve ended up, maybe that sense of dislocation is the desired final effect.” — Maureen Corrigan (NPR)