DESCRIPTION

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 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Chicago with her family.

REVIEWS

"Weird and wonderful, surreal and subversive, these stories prove that Ma is well on her way to a landmark career." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“Dreamy stories, each with a foot in the fantastic and the other foot firmly in the appalling everyday.”—Emily Temple, Literary Hub

“[A] fantastical and often brilliant collection . . . Enchanting, full of intelligence, dry humor, and an appealing self-awareness.”—Publishers Weekly

“Deliciously bizarre . . . [Bliss Montage] will feel familiar to anyone who has wanted to scream at the mundanity of everyday life.”—Susie Dumond, Book Riot

“Ma again proves her biting sense of humor and gift for subtlety in a collection of eight short stories, all surreal and jarring in the most sensational way ... Ma masterfully takes on heavy topics such as abuse and loneliness with sprawling, spinning plotlines. All the while, she interweaves the experience of Chinese American women, touching on visibility, assimilation, and the expectations of immigrant mothers. A fantastical collection that grows more and more captivating with each page.” —Allison Cho, Booklist

Named a Must Read by The New York Times, Time, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Esquire, Nylon, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Gothamist, Associated Press, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, Literary Hub, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Book Riot, Pop Sugar, Polygon, and Tor.com

Picture Book is teaming up with Parson Brown the maker of sustainable, functional, and beautiful hemp-derived products to host a book club. It’s FREE and open and welcoming to all! For the first installment, we’re reading the surreal short story collection Bliss Montage by Ling Ma, author of award-winning Severance. We’ll meet to discuss this book on October 3rd at 8 pm in HudCo so email picturebookny@gmail.com to let us know you’ll be joining. For those who don't live nearby, you can read along with us & we’ll discuss online. Can’t wait to hear what you think of this weird and wonderful collection!