Bliss Montage Ling Ma by Ling Ma 9780374293512, 0374293511, B09RVTLLVL instant download after payment.

A new creation by the author of Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages. What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the every day to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? 

"Weird and wonderful, surreal and 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 and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, and 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, and 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)