Bliss Montage: Stories

Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of September 2022: Ling Ma, the author of the best-selling Severance, returns with a story collection that pushes the boundaries of reality to expose the nuance of human connection, motherhood, love and loneliness. In "Los Angeles," the narrator lives with her husband and children, and 100 of her ex-boyfriends; in "Return," a woman wrestles with the discontents of her marriage when she’s separated from her husband and he’s buried alive; there’s a story called "Yeti Lovemaking," which, as you probably guessed, is exactly what it sounds like—and it’s great. Throughout these eight strange and surreal stories, Ma’s characters are introspective (“unlike the rest of us, he didn’t swim against the tide of himself.”), practical (“I liked him up to a mile”), and profound (“An ideology defined only by what it opposes is doomed to be defined by that exact thing.") Utterly immersive, bizarre, and an example of how the best fiction can open your mind to something new and different. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
A National Indie Bestseller
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
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.