Synopsis

Ling Ma's debut novel Severance announced a writer with an uncanny ability to locate dread inside the mundane. Bliss Montage collects eight stories that push that instinct further—into stranger, more intimate territory.

The scenarios are deliberately outlandish: a woman who shares her home with every ex-boyfriend she's ever had; a toxic friendship sustained by a drug that renders you invisible; an ancient burial ritual rumored to heal anything that ails you. But Ma uses the fantastical as a pressure valve, letting it release truths about love, loneliness, possession, motherhood, and the idea of home that realism might not reach.

What unites the eight stories is Ma's insistence that the surreal and the everyday are not opposites—they are the same thing, viewed from different angles. Fantasy tears through the screen of ordinary life not to escape it but to reveal what was always there.

Bliss Montage is a collection that disorients deliberately, and lingers long after the final page.