I’m completely mesmerized by Ling Ma’s writing. Her prose is amazing; my jaw was on the floor most of the time and from the beginning of this collection (Los Angeles) from the imagery.

The stories take on surrealist vibes, and more often leave you wondering if you’re still reading the same story. It had me saying, “what??” on more than one occasion. I think this will take many rereads so that I will be able to really capture all the nuances of each story.

This was a weird and wild ride! These short stories had great range and really intriguing story plots. As with most short stories, there were some lulls. However, the house of boyfriends, the Yeti lover, and the protruding baby hand are things that will stay in my mind for a long long time. Not sure if I am grateful for that or traumatized, but at the very least I am forever //changed// LOL. This is my first Ling Ma collection, and I will definitely be reading more of their work!

P.S. That cover is PERFECTION. I love fruits on anything, and this cover is no exception.

Bliss Montage is somehow muted and vibrant all at once - each story left me feeling contemplative and imbued with a kind of ferocious energy. My friends and I took this collection to the beach and read the stories aloud to each other, and hearing them told like that was such a special experience. While it's hard to rate any short story collection five stars, I think I'm biased toward this one with how beautiful that exchange was, and it will be important to me for a while to come for that reason.

Still, this collection is deserving of its high rating. Nearly every story was engaging, and my favorite was "Office Hours" - a good portal story always pulls me in. However, the moment that hit me most intensely was from "Peking Duck", where Ling Ma writes: "A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her."

An absolutely stunning collection that will stick with me!

I had read "Peking Duck" in the New Yorker some months ago and was astounded by the story. I don't think I've read a piece before that aches with such honesty for the immigrant experience so much as Ling Ma does with her work. The realism of the mother-daughter relationship and the inability of the mother to speak echoed in the tropes and bring such a catharsis to the ending.

I have to preface this by saying I was already a fan of Severence. It was one of my favorite books from the last year, with how it winds loops in time, genre, narrative, and tropes. I love a good self-referential piece of art that just toes the line of self-gratuitous. Not to mention the absolute timeliness of that book, my god.

While Bliss Montage is a collection, there is still a similar linkage between the stories--a beating truth that betrays the personhood of the narrator with every ending. I love the fabulism and their metaphorical veneers, which carry an energy while still leaving space for emotional truth to shine through.

Overall, the collection flies by quickly. In an interview, Ma said she had to actively resist the tropes of the "immigrant story" in her MFA. The urgency to tell a more truthful story, while still grounded by the reality of existing in an immigrant body, is hyper-present in Bliss Montage.

Having read and loved Severance by this author, I was really interested to see how the slightly off kilter depiction of every day life would translate into short fiction. Happily, I wasn't disappointed. This is a really interesting collection of stories, some of which are very speculative in tone (Yeti Lovemaking and G) and others which are firmly grounded in reality with a slight twist (Peking Duck, Tomorrow). I think my particular favourites were Oranges which I found quite sinister in a delightful, vengeful way and Office Hours, which was quite poignant and sweet with a kicker of an ending. Overall, this collection has cemented Ling Ma as an auto-read author for me and I can't wait to see what she offers up next!
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. Published September 2022.
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I don't typically gravitate towards short story collections, but I read Ling Ma's Severance (a pandemic novel) in March 2020 (an uncomfortable time to be reading pandemic novels), and loved it, so I was keen to get my hands on copy of Bliss Montage. Thanks to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the digital ARC!
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I found each story in the collection bleeds a bit into the next. The stories involve lonely, yearning protagonists, most of them Asian American women, who find themselves in surreal or even outlandish situations - but Ling Ma describes the bizarre with the same calm prose as the mundane.
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"Peking Duck" is arguably the stand out story of the collection: a story that "frames and reframes an anecdote" about migration and its intergenerational effects. But every story in the collection brings some new distortion of reality: a mother whose unborn baby already has an arm sticking out of her body; a woman living in a mansion with all of her ex-boyfriends and her husband who only speaks in dollar signs; a story about a street drug that makes you invisible; or the "yeti story" (IYKYK and IYDKYDK).
I saw another reviewer on goodreads refer to this collection as "A24esque" and I think that's an appropriate description: perhaps a bit more "Montage" than "Bliss".
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#blissmontage #lingma #farrarstrausgiroux #netgalley #shortstory #shortstories #bookpost #bookreview #bookstagram #severance

This book did not get nearly enough press for the quality of the stories. Definitely an author with long lasting potential

I enjoyed this collection of stories more than Ling Ma's 2018 pandemic novel Severance, and the Black Mirror-esque narrative conceits were more effective as short-form fiction. Ma is a keen sociological observer of overeducated millennial Asian-Americans with MFAs in New York and LA, especially the quirks of the experience of emigrating from China as a young child. Her prose style is unfailingly precise and insightful, and wonderfully compelling at the sentence level.

Not every story fully delivers on the surreal twists of its science-fictional premises, like the professor's office closet as a portal to Narnia in "Office Hours," and the Eastern European stuck-in-the-airport travelogue in "Returning." But a couple of them really land, especially "G," about a drug that makes its users invisible, and an abusively codependent friendship, and "Peking Duck," a metafictional narrative about a recently-immigrated Chinese mother getting fired from her under-the-table job as a nanny after a cringeworthy experience with a traveling salesman.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

I absolutely love Ling Ma's books and she has become one of my new favorite authors! The stories in this book evoked many different emotions and I really enjoy her perspective as a writer.

Thank you Netgalley and Penguin for the ARC. 2022 was a really great year for short stories and novellas and this was one of them. The cover is gorgeous, Ling's writing beautiful, and the stories wild amd haunting. I'm excited to read more for Ling Ma after this.

Every story in this collection surprised me and pulled me in. By the end of each story I was like, "wait I would read a whole book with this premise." Yet, I appreciate that Ma gave us so many interesting, weird worlds in this book. I never know what I'm going to get when I read Ling Ma's writing, except that I'm going to be disoriented in the best way possible.

While the premise of the stories were quirky and interesting, unfortunately I found that the characters were two-dimensional and lacked a resolute emotional core that made them believable. I also did not fully understand the cohesion of the stories, it felt more like the author had a popular novel and this was a collection of her stories she wrote. It diminished the power of the collection though.

A beautiful collection of short stories with Asian American female characters. It's interesting and I enjoyed "100 Boyfriends,, G, and Peking Duck.

Bliss Montage is a great collection of stories. Each story was captivating and left me wishing it was a stand alone book so that could see what happened next.
This was my first ARC and I'm very pleased to say that it was a great read! If you like stories surrounding complicated friendships and toxic relationships- all with a fantastical twist, vou will love this book!
I'm not normally one to enjoy fabled stories, especially when they have a dark twist, but I genuinely enjoyed every single story in this collection.
My favourite stories were G and Office Hours.

I really like Ling Ma’s writing, I enjoyed her first book Severence a lot. This book wasn’t as memorable for me, probably due in fact to my antipathy towards story collections. I think other people would enjoy this, but it was not my favorite.

I really enjoyed this set of short stories, quiet stories with a touch of surrealism, stories that left me thinking about them long after I moved on (I am still thinking of Office Hours days later, it was my favorite). 4 stars because I didn’t like Yeti Lovemaking but this is overall a really strong collection.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the eARC. Opinions all my own!

This will be the crowd pleaser in cruise control. Delectable stories that play out like a Twilight Zone marathon without any of the horror. Instead we delve into weird worlds. Sex with a Yeti. Baby Arms that aren't supposed to grow

Ling Ma's workplace dystopia in "Severance" was so compelling that I will read anything she cares to write. Here, we have a collection of often-surreal short stories mostly revolving around women who feel out of place in some way. My favorite of the batch was "Office Hours," in which a woman reflects on a professor who became a sort of mentor to her and whose job she eventually takes after earning her own doctorate. There's a magical wardrobe in the faculty office, but that touch of magic doesn't prevent the story from capturing some very real elements of workplace interactions and dissatisfactions.

Absolutely fantastic collection of weird and wonderful stories. The first - a building with `100 boyfriends - sets the stage for the rest of this fast and sharp collection.

I loved Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance, and though I don’t typically love short story collections, I knew I had to read this. These stories were phenomenal, connected by discussions of the immigrant experience in America, as well as themes of both surreal travel and fantastical weirdness. I really enjoyed each of these stories, but my main gripe with short stories remained true; they often stop as soon as we get to the good part. I especially felt that with the stories Returning, Office Hours, and Tomorrow, but I don’t see that as a bad thing necessarily, just that the worlds Ma builds are so fascinating I can’t be satisfied with just a peek into them. Ling Ma has absolutely become a new favorite and I will certainly pick up her next work.