Bliss Montage
“Weird and wonderful, surreal and subversive.”
Esquire
A Time Magazine Pick
A Los Angeles Times Pick
A Philadelphia Inquirer Pick of Must-Reads
An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
Among longlisted titles for New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2022
Among longlisted titles for Powell's Best Books of the Year, 2022
Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2022
Among longlisted titles for Library Journal Best Books of the Year, 2022
Among shortlisted titles for National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, 2023
Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2022
Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner, 2022
Among longlisted titles for Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2022
"Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection."- AudioFile
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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Praise