Bliss Montage: Stories

Bliss Montage is Ling Ma's first story collection, eight stories published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2022, each built on one impossible premise pursued with a straight face. In "Los Angeles" a woman lives in a house with her husband, her children's au pairs and, in a wing of their own, all one hundred of her ex boyfriends; the husband's dialogue is printed as dollar signs. "Oranges" picks up the same narrator as she follows an abusive ex and confronts his new girlfriend, unsure herself whether she is warning the woman or taking revenge. In "G" two Chinese immigrant friends take a drug that makes them invisible on the night before one of them leaves New York, and the story is really about a friendship neither chose. "Yeti Lovemaking" is what it says.

"Returning" begins at a panel of immigrant authors, where the narrator meets the man she will marry, and ends in his invented homeland, Garboza, where he abandons her at the airport and where a ritual burial awaits. In "Office Hours" a young academic and the film professor who mentored her share a wardrobe that opens somewhere else. "Peking Duck," which Camille Bromley in Wired admired as a layered, Rashomon style turn on the conflict between an Asian American mother and daughter, has a Chinese American writer telling and retelling a story that belongs to her mother. "Tomorrow" is about a pregnancy in which the baby's arm protrudes from the mother's body, and about a trip to a great aunt in China conducted through a translation app.

The stories are short, plainly told and often funny, and the strangeness sits inside ordinary apartments, offices and marriages, which is what makes it land. Lovia Gyarkye in the New York Times found "a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal," if inconsistent in places; Kirkus called it "haunting and artful"; Publishers Weekly found the best of the stories "enchanting, full of intelligence, dry humor," and thought a couple never got beyond their conceit. It suits readers of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link, and anyone who liked Severance and wants Ma at shorter length.