This was my introduction to Ling Ma, and what an introduction it was. Although I struggle with short story collections this one will be added to my list of favorites. These stories are thought provoking, unsettling (in a good way?), and fantastically written. Returning was definitely my favorite, Office Hours was probably my least favorite, and Tomorrow left me wondering what on earth I'd just read.
Highly recommend this!!

Stop! You are making me like short stories and I’m not a short story person. I like borderline long winded stuff with complex storyline! Fine… I liked your short stories very much Ling Ma. You got me. But no, I’m not going to bury myself 6 feet under at night hoping to wake up changed in the morning 😅

Each story is a call for connection and understanding: whether the person is recovering from domestic violence, broken mother daughter relationship, or loneliness in general. Each story represents different levels of measures people take to protect themselves and break free from connectionlessness (don’t know if that’s word). There are so many individual sentences in these stories that have whole world trapped in them only for you to find yourself trapped in them too.

And this is why I love reading books. Because I couldn’t have explained it better: “During the years I lived alone, even in my self-imposed solitude there had been a part of myself I was afraid of. I worked too much, as if it were the only thing, to diminishing returns. Left to my own devices, there was a streak of masochism in my single-minded, obsessive habits. I didn't exercise that much, but when I did, it was in gruesome marathons of overexertion. I didn't eat enough, and when I did, it was in wild, sobering feasts, remembering that I even had a body. I made myself sick. Unregulated, I would have eventually destroyed myself. Yet even knowing this didn't motivate me to change my ways.”

This is a short story collection about...all kinds of things. We have 100 ex-boyfriends living in the house, Yeti lovers, baby arms. I mean. Anything you would never think of. While I am sure some of theses stories went over my head, I still really enjoyed reading them. It has been a few days since I have finished and I will randomly think about certain stories. I have told multiple people in my everyday life about this book.

This definitely won't be for everyone. Her writing style seemed different to me than most writers, but didn't take long to get used to. A lot of the stories endings just stop, which for sure leaving you wanting to know what happens next. At times, this was disappointing because I really wanted to know what happened next!

All in all, it was a good time. Looking forward to reading more of her in the future.

Thank you Ling Ma, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and NetGalley for an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

I actually don’t think I can put into words how much this book confused me, and not in a good way… I usually don’t mind being confused in a book as long as it is intentional for the storytelling or serves some sort of purpose in the overarching theme of the book. That being said, I don’t think I was meant to be feeling this way while reading these stories.

This was a major flop for me unfortunately. The only two stories I semi-enjoyed were Yeti Lovemaking and Peking Duck. If it weren’t for those two stories I would have given this book a 1 star rating AS MUCH AS I HATE TO SAY IT

Ling Ma's collection of short stories in "Bliss Montage" are strange and intoxicating and I loved reading through each and every one. Veering just into the fantastical, these works are hard to define but each one of them presented a world within itself, rich in character and setting. It's hard to really properly describe this collection of stories, but what I will say is that I loved it very much and definitely plan to continue coming back to these stories for another taste. I highly recommend.

🌟BLISS MONTAGE🌟 by Ling Ma ~to be published September 13, 2022

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️+ This is one of the best short story collections I have ever read. These stories will linger. A new favorite.

Thank you to @fsgbooks and @netgally for the complimentary advance review copy. All thoughts are my own.

You know how when you go to sell your house, you’re supposed to clear out all of your personal items, paint the walls in neutral colors, choose art that won’t offend anyone, and make it as appealing as possible to a broad audience? Some books are like that, too. They are crowd pleasers with near universal appeal. On the other hand, some spaces are so special, so individual (perhaps even polarizing), and so uniquely designed to your precise tastes that they practically ARE you. This is that book for me.

I love love loved this book. Within two pages I knew I was going to love it. Ma’s writing is so clever, so avant garde, so inquisitive. Through eight stories, Ma explores love and relationships, toxic friendship, the mother-daughter immigrant experience, and the meaning of connection (to a person or a place). The stories are speculative, surreal, absurd, bizarre, sometimes fantastical, and always thought-provoking.

It’s very hard for me to review books that I really connect with – putting the connection I felt into words often takes me months of reflection – but maybe it’s enough for me to say that I will now read everything Ma has written or will ever write (Severance is on my nightstand as I type this).

I have seen some reviewers comment that the narrators of these stories all sound the same. I believe this was a deliberate choice on Ma’s part, and I actually really loved it (the narrator’s voice reminded me of the narrator from Cursed Bunny). I have also seen almost every reviewer comment on that AMAZING cover, and I will add my voice to the universal praise.

In summary, holy expletive this was good.

This is not your average collection of short stories.

*First, round of applause for the cover*

‘Bliss Montage’ by Ling Ma is a collection that is odd and fantastical with depth.

The stories are distinct and centered around different versions of relationships but the mindset you should go into all of them should be the same — an open mind, where anything is possible.

Through the stories, we explore drug use, toxic friendships, abusive relationships,
motherhood, the idea of home, and more.

‘Los Angeles’ starts us off with a woman who lives in a home with 100 of her ex-boyfriends that hooked me from the start and might be the most normal story. ‘Oranges’ follows a woman who is traumatized by her previous abusive relationship.

The more strange and unsettling stories are ‘G’ where two friends take a drug that makes you invisible and plays with the idea of self-erasure. ‘Tomorrow’ where a woman who goes through pregnancy with her baby’s arm sticking out of her and ‘Yeti Lovemaking’ is a story about lovemaking with a yeti 🤨 …

I can’t lie, I’m still processing some of the stories and I do think some might have gone over my head (Yeti Lovemaking). This collection might not be for everyone but I enjoyed the bizarre ride — it's very different than the short stories I normally read and I am looking forward to reading ‘Severance’ by Ling.

Some of my personal favorites were

Los Angeles
Oranges
G
Peking Duck

Thank you so much FSG for the gifted copy. If you want something unique, bizarre, and outlandish, give this one a try! A24 film fans will love this one.

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma investigates identity, family, and romantic relationships through stories both fantastical and seemingly autobiographical. Once again, I found myself captivated by Ling Ma's prose. She has quickly become one of my favorite authors for the way she wields language so precisely. My favorites of the collection were Los Angeles, Returning, and Office Hours. Although I enjoyed the more realistic stories as well, and especially their insight into the Asian American experience, I think Ling Ma is one of the best writers of escapism today. I also enjoyed the common threads running through various stories, such as the repetition of the Adam character in Los Angeles and Oranges.

The only story that fell short for me was Yeti Lovemaking, as I felt it could have been fleshed out more. I didn't quite understand the message.

Overall, I would recommend this book to fans of literary fiction, and especially those who enjoyed Severance. I will be promoting this book to my followers on my Tiktok, @hales.reads

Definitely an uneven collection for me, but those stories that shone, really did so. Usually I prefer more grounding in my fiction, but chose this book upon learning that Ling Ma was responsible for the astounding Severance, which has lingered with me months later. Some of the stories are jarring in that after a beginning seemingly rooted in reality, there is a sharp turn into the surreal. I believe the point being made here, since the protagonists are Chinese American women, is the search for identity, recognition, and attempt to remain visible.

my friends and i have a group chat called “ling ma fan club”

although not quite as soul-wrenchingly gorgeous and life-ruining as severance, and at times frustrating (particularly ma’s tendency to end stories with ambiguous, open-ended futures, just kind of stopping, something she does acknowledge metatextually within “returning”), this collection is going to haunt me for a long time. ling ma is brilliant and packs so much into such spare prose, managing both deep emotion and cold detachment in the same sentence. i will read anything she writes.

(full disclosure: ling was my professor in my undergraduate creative writing program, and was brilliant and a joy to work with. thank you for providing me with a review copy!)

Ling Ma's short stories are an ode to the beautiful and the bizarre. Clearly an enormously talented writer, her work is engaging, entertaining, and refreshingly unique.

Thank you NetGalley, Linga Ma, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my honest and wholly independent opinion.

Really good collection. In some regards it reminded me of two other collections I read this year, GODS OF WANT and VALLEYESQUE. It’s a little eerie and surrealistic, which I believe can be hard to execute, but it was done very well here.

What’s interesting, also, is that it’s completely different from SEVERANCE. You should not come into this book with any expectations whatsoever. Even the writing style, I found, was different; it was more playful, even when the plot was dramatic.

Ling Ma has delivered us a seriously BRILLIANT set of short stories. But what else would we expect from the author of the expertly-written Severance??

And when I say seriously brilliant I am talking basically perfect. There’s an overarching feeling that unites all of these stories together while each is so utterly unique that it could be its own novel.

The stories were dreamy and whimsical, but also contained an undercurrent of frustration, like getting your wings clipped. Even the title “Bliss Montage” refers to rapid little bursts of happy scenes from a movie. There’s joy but it feels relegated to only certain segments.

Each one of the eight stories involves something delightfully specific like: a woman wholives with her 100 ex-boyfriends, a woman who is surprised when a date unzips his human suit off to show he’s actually a yeti, a woman who takes a drug that makes her invisible, and a woman who sneaks out of an airport in a small Eastern European city to check on her husband involved in a local custom in which folks are buried alive. Y’all don’t even get me STARTED on that baby arm. IYKYK.

Sometimes these stories feel personal like when the characters deal with Asian immigrant parents and cultural pressures. Ma shines when she mixes these intergenerational stories in with the completely absurd.

I found each of these stories immensely enjoyable and devoured them all in one sitting. What a freaking writer!

🍊Bliss Montage🍊

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Until this year, I haven’t really enjoyed short stories. Maybe it’s because I only ever read them in school that I thought they were just conveniently brief bits of writing that the author could have turned into a full-length novel, but never did? Anyway, consider me converted. This is a really, really good short story collection, out tomorrow, 9/13 (or today at select Barnes and Nobles, apparently).

Synopsis: Ling Ma expands on her fantastical, distorted sense of reality from her debut novel, Severance, to explore different versions of lifting the proverbial curtain - entering liminal spaces to unpack her characters’ lives. In the eight stories, the main characters (all Asian-American women with immigrant parents drifting through life) try to deal with toxic/failing relationships, loneliness, motherhood, and marginalization through experimental, often otherworldly means that force the reader to think about what it looks like when the surreal becomes normal.

This is a really, really thought-provoking, page-turning little story collection. I didn’t love all the stories, but there were some that I honestly wanted to be novellas or full-length novels because the concepts were so captivating. If you’ve read Severance, this book is very similar in style and tone without the post-apocalyptic/dystopian suspense. Ironically, I think some of these stories could be studied in a literature class because there is just enough mystery to merit discussion on all kinds of themes. I highlighted my ebook way more than I usually do for non-academic reading because there were so many excellent passages and quotes to think about. Overall, check this out if you want some small bits of writing that send you down the rabbit hole (in a good way!)

Many thanks to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for allowing me to rate and review this book! All thoughts and opinions are my
own.

CW: abusive relationships, eating disorders, abnormal pregnancy/pregnancy trauma, premature burial ritual

The follow-up to Ling Ma’s sensational debut novel Severance, in which a despondent office worker navigates a pandemic-turned-zombie-apocalypse, Bliss Montage bursts with surreal delights.

Not only an absorbing collection of eight short stories, Bliss Montage is also a showcase of Ma’s incredible narrative control and diverse talents. Ma engages speculative elements, always with an eye to raising each story’s precisely rendered emotional stakes. In Bliss Montage women live in claustrophobic, labyrinthine houses with all of their exes, seriously contemplate rebounding from break-ups with honest-to-God yetis, and take drugs that render them temporarily, physically invisible—but lay their interpersonal tensions bare. The collection is at its best when it engages these fresh takes on the supernatural, which both drive memorable conflicts and create sly moments of humour. (In “Los Angeles,” the narrator’s husband speaks entirely in dollar signs.)

A tour de force in tone, Bliss Montage is invested in yearning—for understanding, for resolution, for home. Ma’s work is attentive to the gaps in perspective, to the gulfs that emerge when our vision of the world knocks up against someone else’s. With particular attention to the tropes of and expectations foisted upon Asian American literature, Ma’s stories deftly interrogate notions of authenticity, passivity, and cliché. Sensitive, smart, and stylish, Bliss Montage promises to be one of the most memorable collections of the year.

Review forthcoming in NUVO Magazine (print and online): https://nuvomagazine.com/

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Short stories seem to be the move for this fall -- I've read a few new releases that are such. Sometimes they feel connected, sometimes they do not. But I am learning that I think I prefer when they are extremely different and clearly disconnected, each trying to tell their own individual story. Because when they are connected, as these seem to be, I find that I get lost in the sauce. And I think anything that the collection is saying gets diluted.

I enjoyed a few of the stories and others left me feeling unsettled in a way that I didn't totally expect from Ling Ma -- Severence was unsettling but it felt resolved in a lot of ways by the end. I think that this wasn't totally what I expected.

3.5 stars.

Reading this made me want to reread Severance again, this is more of a 3.5 rating and here are my reasons:

- Ling Ma’s main characters are usually fascinating that she goes beyond the usual immigrant stories that we know of and I truly love how she presented the relationships of her characters here
- This reminded me of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and how for Asian people, especially immigrants, the English language is power and a status symbol
- I LOVE THE TITLE SO MUCH it’s the most realistic part of this collection
- What made me rate it a little lower than most of the reviews here was that I expecting the stories to go beyond just the fantasy of everything because I feel like some bits were confused in becoming a fantasy or a surrealist story. I also thought that it will be unique that each story will be interlaced with each other and this also disappointed me somehow.

This is truly a high recommendation this year and I cannot wait for Ling Ma’s future works. Big thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the arc!

I read Severance and really enjoyed it and am glad that I read it prior to Bliss Montage. 3.5 stars if there was a way to enlist half stars—and lo despite reader outcry there continues not to be…

This collection of works does so many things and probably Matthew Salesses should have blurbed Bliss Montage because his book “Craft in the Real World” offers windows for analyses and takeaway—and lo Salesses has not.

What I tease out from this collection are the following themes: the Frame Story and how this structural tool offers readers a position through which to travel that offers boundaries and a reminder to be open and not impose cultural standpoints on author intent, story valuation and an overall interpretation of what a story is attempting to accomplish. The Frame Story is also toyed with as it frames, reframes, appears and reappears in some but not all stories. Other themes explore racial stereotyping, Asian hate, displacement and cultural barriers for citizens and non in varied cultural contexts. Ma also looks at women and their experiences in institutions such as academia, family, marriage and work. Women’s lives are portrayed as contingent upon men and confusing when individual women exercise agency on behalf of themselves or other women.

Some of the stories felt highly personal when explored were the mother daughter relationships and in these moments the narratives ran longer, more detailed and insightful. Marked for me was the acceptance and respect regardless of the painful honesty Ma shares in the minds of her mother/daughter characters. Men are mostly not given the same depth and figure more often as witnesses or self driven in terms of actions taken that move the stories forward.

The nods toward the impact of cultural appropriation and the degrees of offensiveness that occur when a person’s cultural content is perceived appropriated or another is accused of doing so lean toward finger-pointing at whiteness which while understandable does not consider a wider personage who commit similar acts. It matters when this happens and can matter more when more widely represented and examined. Nonetheless the presentation of the impact on people when cultural appropriation occurs is crystal clear and the point is well made for readers to consider.

Ma has a way of neutralizing her environment and characters by way of meditative organized prose. For me this creates a relaxed state and an acceptance of any quirky thing that can happen and quirky things do happen that border on horror and grotesque though Ma infuses humor in the extremes she creates with the Morning Festival in Garboza and the geriatric pregnancy during which a pregnant woman must endure a fetal arm handing out of her womb during an extra long gestational period. The care and tolerance this woman practices is really something and child bearing and relationships suffer the challenges Ma imposes on them.

Overall, I liked this book but the desire to read them as a total work and the frustration at not being able to do so fluidly was distracting for me. Likely, I will purchase a paper copy and revisit a review again but in an effort to comply with Netgalley guidelines, I wanted to jot this off. By the way, thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book and share an honest review.

Ling Ma is excellent at atmosphere, and at leaving empty space in her narratives. These off-beat short stories have a lot of beauty in them, both soft and repulsive.

3 stars

I am grateful to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review.

I requested this book from the publisher because I really enjoyed the author’s novel Severance, and I was looking forward to reading something else from her, but I don't think her short stories are necessarily for me. I love the short story format so I thought that this would definitely be a hit for me, but rather I found it to just be an OK reading experience. Some of the short stories did stand out to me as very enjoyable and memorable; However, the majority of the short stories just fell quite flat leaving no impact on me whatsoever.

On a positive note, the writing was just as good as I was expecting it to be, and the speculative twists that showed up in many of the stories were quite welcome and interesting. Since there was nothing technically wrong with any of the stories, I will chalk this up to personal taste and say that this short story collection just was not delivered in a way that fit me as a reader. I do think that there will be people who truly enjoy this collection, especially since it was so cohesive and thematically quite strong.

Though this was not my favorite collection, I would recommend this to readers of literary fiction who enjoy short stories and interconnected collections.