Bliss montage by ling ma5/19/2023 Those are just the As.” She lives in material comfort but fixates on her past. The narrator of “Los Angeles,” who meets her rich, emotionally absent husband on, shares a mansion with him, her two children, and her one hundred ex-boyfriends: “Aaron. Both depict a protagonist confronting the fallout of an abusive relationship with a man named Adam, but “Los Angeles” is absurdist and bitingly satirical, while “Oranges” dwells on the mundane in a matter-of-fact tone. The first two stories, “Los Angeles” and “Oranges,” most clearly demonstrate this tendency. Readers who appreciate the incisive humor, penetrating social critique, and generic mashup of Severance will be delighted by Bliss Montage, Ma’s first collection of short stories, which mixes the absurd and fantastical with moving evocations of the intimate and everyday.īliss Montage’s stories range from the realist (“Oranges,” “Peking Duck”) to the absurdist (“Los Angeles,” “Yeti Lovemaking,” “Tomorrow”) to the gently fantastical (“G,” “Office Hours,” “Returning”), yet the stories read like variations on a theme-alternate (if wildly different) lives that the same person could have lived. Severance received rave reviews upon publication and resurged in public discourse in 2020, when an actual pandemic transformed the world. A tale of a pandemic-induced zombie apocalypse, Severance is also a novel of immigrant experience and a portrait of millennial malaise. Ling Ma’s 2018 debut novel Severance captured the literary world’s attention with its original blending of genres.
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