Bliss Montage
Ling Ma's first short story collection, written after the runaway success of Severance, takes the everyday surreal premises of her debut and lets them flower into eight self-contained stories. A woman lives with her husband and their two hundred ex-boyfriends in a Los Angeles mansion. Two friends take a Chinese drug called G that turns them invisible and use it to revisit their old lives. A young Chinese American woman watches her mother fall in love with a yeti. Ma's prose remains cool, dry, and gently devastating, the kind of quiet voice that lets a story walk you halfway across an absurd metaphor before you notice you are no longer in the literal world. The collection deepens her reputation as one of the most distinct stylists of her generation.
Themes & atmosphere
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What you might want to know about Bliss Montage
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Eight short stories from the author of Severance: a woman lives in a mansion with her hundred ex-boyfriends, friends try a drug that turns them invisible, a mother pulls her daughter back to Fuzhou.
Yes. Bliss Montage is Ling Ma's 2022 collection of eight short stories, her follow-up to the novel Severance. The stories blend literary fiction with surreal, speculative, and horror elements.
Bliss Montage was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Story Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, Time, and others.
Bliss Montage was written by Ling Ma, published in 2022 by Picador.
Bliss Montage is 240 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Bliss Montage takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Bliss Montage is a standalone novel by Ling Ma, not part of a series.
Bliss Montage is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.