Bliss Montage

Stories

By: Ling Ma

Narrated by: Katharine Chin

"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.

Ling Ma hooked me with Severance, and this collection doesn’t disappoint.

The story G is everything. The whole collection is wonderful, but this story should be in every high school curriculum. The structure, pacing, and vivid, grounding bits of detail are what I most love in her speculative fiction. It is not the extraordinary, but the mundane that makes her work so believable and her characters so alive. I read Severance shortly before COVID and her imagining of New York in a pandemic was eerily prescient in detail and attitude. She again creates a canvas of the familiar and then slips in the wildly fictitious detail like a dog pill wrapped in a bit of cheese. I couldn’t love her work more- she is the voice of her generation for me.

Audio defect is annoying

The stories are very novel. I like the drug setting a lot and I think the symbolism is relatable.

Peking Duck

Came here from Severance. These were all excellent but I'll re-listen to Peking Duck for years to come.

Loved every story.

Prescient, entirely unique, devastating and so often LOL funny…. And the performance is so on point, timing, tone - I couldn’t stop listening. A newly minted Ling Ma fan.

Such wonderfully told stories

Definitely was sold on this book after about one minute in. It was fun, funny, well written and very creative.