BLISS MONTAGE: Ling Ma's Short Stories Escape Reality

She knows how to write an absurd world that shows the shortfalls of our reality.

Ling Ma is the award-winning author of the novel Severance (unrelated to the Apple show, yet accidentally its thematic cousin). In her second book, Bliss Montage, her short stories tinker with reality to show women keeping themselves within, or pushing, the boundaries of their own lives.

For as academic as that sounds, we have to take into account how weird the worlds are that Ma builds. Her protagonists are liable to:

• have a one-night stand with a Yeti

• discover a Narnia-esque escape in a professor's office

• overdose on an invisibility drug

• travel to a fictional country

• carry a pregnancy with one baby limb extended outside the mother’s body

Each of the stories circle indecision. Often, these stories leave the reader right as the protagonist hovers on the edge of a final decision. And that’s the point.

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Ma borrowed the titular phrase "bliss montage" from Wesleyan film professor Jeanine Basinger. Bas…