We go to Urth Caffe to do some light reading,” she writes.

“On the Husband’s credit card: 101 burgers at Umami Burger, 101 admission tickets to LACMA, 101 golden milks at Moon Juice. Moneybags husband who she meets on a website called, and pays for them all to take a Porsche, clown car style, to the Getty Museum. In “Los Angeles,” a woman lives with her 100 ex-boyfriends and Mr. “You can go anywhere, unimpeded by the microaggressions of strangers,” she writes. In “G,” two women take a drug that makes them invisible and run amok in a midtown Sephora. In “Tomorrow,” a woman tries to give birth only to be left with the single arm of a baby protruding from her. Ma’s characters, who are mostly women, many Chinese American, inhabit various states of joy sprees in a surreal, just off-center universe. Ma’s stories in Bliss Montage share a similar, strange familiarity, as she renders realities that are a little too easy to inhabit. It was dubbed “ the novel for the coronavirus era” in 2020 for its eerily prophetic plot, which centered around a young woman in post-apocalyptic Chicago ravaged by a pandemic from a deadly disease originating in China masks are in fashion and the protagonist moves into her office when public transportation shuts down so she can keep working throughout it. Ma’s debut novel Severance, which was published in 2018, is decidedly not a bliss montage. It's the part that makes me want to write fiction.” And I guess for me, those are my favorite parts of learning what stories were, especially when I first came to the states. “ was kind of my springboard into the story,” Ma tells NYLON from her home in Chicago. Ling Ma’s favorite part of a story is the bliss montage – the sequence in which a character gets a brief moment of ecstasy, before life gets complicated: think Kevin McCallister maxing out his parents’ credit cards upon discovering his parents are gone in Home Alone.

Ling ma bliss montage stories