Surreal, tense, and evocative. The collection of short stories shares a similar tone and themes around women' being at odds with men, second generation immigrant Asian women coming to terms with their own identity, and the absurdity of our own reality. The standout stories for me where Returning, Oranges, and my personal favorite story, Peking Duck. Peking Duck is so beautifully structured, the characterization of her own mother feels so humanizing, and even though you already know the ending, it feels like a stab to the gut in the best way possible. For a collection of short stories, the tone and voice are so clear and connected, and the writing is so beautifully unexpected, that the whole book together makes sense. This book will leave you feeling like you woke up from a fever dream you cannot shake.

Genius, absolutely genius.

Oh what I would do to have Ling Ma's brain. What a wonderful and refreshing collection of short stories. Each stories is different yet somehow they are all connected in a subtle manner. After finishing each story, I could not help but yearn for more. If I had one criticism for this book is that it is too short (also that I have to wait to receive her next book...)., I would've liked this to be at least twice as long.

Some stories were so full of nostalgia my heart felt like exploding. Some were puzzling. Some were nothing but weird (looking at you Yeti Lovemaking). But each story tickled my brain in a beautiful way. I have not been able to think of anything but this book for the past few days. It transformed me, my entire heart belongs to it.

I cannot believe this book only comes out in physical form in September. I will be waiting impatiently until I can buy a copy and re-read it until I become one with it. Not only one of my favourite 2022 reads but one of my favourite books ever.

Thank you Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And biggest thanks to Ling Ma, I'm a new fan.

Interesting and well written I just personally couldn’t get into the story. Just a little slow and unbelievable at some points. As with all short story complications some were a lot better than others. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The oranges on the cover of "Bliss Montage" by Ling Ma are hidden behind plastic wrap, in full view but behind something that needs to be ripped off. I think this image summarizes the book perfectly.

This is a collection of eight stories, and it's probably best to read them one story a day: they are very condensed. In all the stories, the main character is a woman - and I feel it's the same woman - who moves between reality and fantasy, sometimes quite literally, as in "Office Hours," where moving the armoire reveals a passage to another place. The author reminds us that it's nothing unusual: this is the world Dorothy entered in "The Wizard of Oz" or the world in Tarkovsky's film "The Stalker."

The stories often portray the inability to feel at home in the country one immigrated to and one's birthplace, the strange alienation when misunderstanding is revealed: between mother and daughter (“Peking Duck”) or husband and wife (“Returning.”) Relationships that begin as ordinary transform into dependencies. For example, a friendship between young girls becomes a need for domination, so the drug that makes one invisible is a tool for enslaving another person.

Some stories were heartbreaking ("Oranges"), some unsettling, and there was even a story that I found humorous ("Yeti Lovemaking"), but all of them left me thinking about them long after I closed the book. “Bliss Montage” shows a Kafkaesque world. And a fascinating one.

A deeply, incredibly strange short story collection unlike anything I have ever read. It was amazing. It leans into speculative, surreal stories with endings that don’t so much end as fade away, leaving the reader to sit with the story long after it’s over. I will say the stories don’t seem to have much in common with one another despite the underlying themes of Asian immigrant and female perspectives but ultimately it worked for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I hardly ever read short story collections or literary fiction - so this was stretching for me. But, knowing how much people loved ‘Severance’ I was willing to give it a shot. Los Angeles and Office Hours were my favorites. However, I will admit I did confuse the stories with each other as the narrator seems pretty similar across the 8 stories. (3.5 out of 5 stars)

(Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.)

A collection of surreal and strange short stories that focus on the experiences of women. Some of the stories were really interesting and weird, my favourites being ‘Returning’, ‘Office Hours’, and ‘Peking Duck’. However, I did find that a lot of them started off really strong but had very abrupt endings and felt incomplete. While I enjoyed these mostly I can’t ignore the very glaring issue of their endings just not working at all and bringing the whole story down with it. This was pretty disappointing because I would have really enjoyed this collection more without that. Overall, I still enjoyed it and my favourite stories helped to bring the rating up. I hope to read more from Ling Ma in the future but for now this is a solid 3.5 stars (bumped up to 4 on some platforms).

I read Severance back in 2018 when it was released, and even now, years later, I still haven't stopped thinking about it. I can say that the same will likely happen with 'Bliss Montage', a collection of short stories exploring many different themes, but all still maintaining the same intriguing writing style that makes Ling Ma's writing hard to put down. Each story is so unique and individual, but are somehow paired perfectly in the collection and often touch on themes of female identity and the Asian-American immigrant experience. I was particularly struck by the stories that come later in the collection, 'Office Hours' and 'Peking Duck', The first story, 'Los Angeles' was also striking, and the perfect way to open this electric collection. The cover is also quite stunning. I can't wait to own a copy of this book when it is released and can't wait to read what comes next from Ling Ma.

I wanted to like this, but these stories were really not for me. The only two I connected with at all were the first and last in the collection, though both kind of petered out in interest for me before the end.

What a delicious book and so wonderfully done. The details in each tale were perfectly placed, and with the short length of each story, Ling Ma managed to develop rich characters that only a full-length novel would generally accomplish.

While I enjoyed the variety of stories and how different each one was from the other, I still felt as if they each had a connection, and a small part of me wished they were.
Sharing similar emotions in detailing the thoughts and feelings of each character, Ling Ma created a stark longing that reverberated throughout the landscape of this book. I felt as if I were wandering around each setting, getting lost within the worlds she had so exquisitely created.

I’m still reeling from the writing.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ling Ma has absolutely astounded me with this short story collection. Each tackled different, difficult topics – motherhood, the difficulties in confronting your abuser, girlhood, friendship, and how we attempt to connect with other people in a way that is meaningful – in a beautifully simplistic way. The eight stories Bliss Montage was composed of had me reaching for more, before I realised I had already finished over half of the book and needed to pace myself. It was a battle to decide whether I should succumb to my desires to know what would happen next (what world would Ling Ma take me to if I turned the page?) versus savouring each line.

There was a slight nauseatingly liberating feeling reading some of the stories. The way they connected with the reader disturbed me to the core, because I hadn't felt so exposed by an author's words in a very long time. She’s mastered the art of writing a story where the reader can pour their emotions into the characters without making the story, on its own, be flat and dull. It was also very reflective, and had me considering my own relationships with people that I hadn’t thought to consider before. And it had me full of nostalgia. Ling Ma has captured the feeling of missing someone, or mourning them, even when they’re right in front of you extremely well.

Los Angeles, Oranges, G, and Tomorrow remain my favourite stories of the collection (which is half of the book, but it’s very hard to choose favourites when the rest seem to have no flaws). Some of the lines in Los Angeles I will continue to think about for a long time, and the feelings I had during Tomorrow will stay with me forever. Although some of these stories had me wanting more, I found that each was still very satisfying and stood their ground well. I enjoyed the surrealist elements of Yeti Lovemaking, Los Angeles, and Office Hours – it was very refreshing.

I will definitely be buying my own copy when this comes out in September. Thank you so much to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for sending me an e-ARC through Netgalley and Ling Ma for her writing talent.

"Jeanine Basinger’s book A Woman’s View describes the “bliss montage” that interrupts many of these movies: “The leading lady can be seen laughing her head off, dressed in fabulous clothes, racing across the water in a speedboat, her yachtsman lover at her side … [The Bliss Montage] is a woman’s small piece of action, her marginal territory of joy. At fadeout, there had to be a man and woman, newly joined or about to be, with a future full of traditional gender roles.” (https://hazlitt.net/feature/efficient-system-exploitation)

So, a very ironic title.

Overall incredible collection. There are a lot of the same themes and dynamics as in Severance, but in a lot of these stories the shorter form makes it all even more effective. Her kind of weird speculative fiction is refreshing for how original it feels. In every story/environment she creates, something is glaringly off but is treated as normalcy by the characters, whether it be the US having lost its global power or a strange shift in the way people interact with each other.

Los Angeles, Oranges, and Yeti Lovemaking were reminding me of the kind of weirdness of Miranda July's short stories and Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. Despite that, these were some of my least favorites. Other things i was reminded of throughout the collection include The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and Midsommar.

G, Returning, and Peking Duck were the stories that really stood out to me with images and descriptions I haven't stopped thinking about since I read them.

A mostly engaging but ultimately a bit underwhelming collection of short stories. Doesn't quite live up to the high standard Ma set with Severance.

Ling Ma is a brilliant writer. I fell in love with her prose with this solid short story collection. Now I want to read her debut novel, "Severance". I absolutely adore short stories and "Bliss Montage" is no exception. These 8 stories pack a punch. There's a couple of quirky stories like "Los Angeles" and "Yeti Lovemaking". There are 2 stories that stand out from the rest, the first is "G" which is about a street drug that makes you invisible. And "Oranges" is the other standout, which deals with domestic violence/trauma. Some stories have some magical realism such "Office Hours" and "Tomorrow". This book totally got me out of my reading slump. I wish I could write like Ling Ma. She is the real deal.

Thank you, Netgalley and FSG for the digital ARC.

Wonderful short stories I enjoyed each one Ling Ma writes so well her characters come alive her storylines drew me in.A wonderful entertaining collection.will be recommending.

Thank you to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Ling Ma for the e-ARC! This short story collection was fantastic. I read Severance beforehand to get a feel for Ling Ma’s writing style and these stories emphasized a lot of my favorite aspects of her novel. The range throughout this collection was stunning. There were many moments throughout reading this where I was thinking “what can’t she do?” From the realistic and mundane settings to the fantasy and sometimes disturbing storylines, she is absolutely brilliant and becoming one of my favorite current authors. I will be keeping an eye out for any and all future releases.

I was a bit torn on how to rate this collection of short stories, while they were all start off being very enticing, many of the endings fell flat. The first few stories also lacked distinctive voices, so they all kind of blurred together. The last three stories are definitely the strongest and left the biggest impressions on me.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely LOVED this collection of stories. Ma explores so many facets of the human experience while weaving in a sense of whimsy and mystery. I will absolutely be picking up a copy of this collection to add to my library.

2.5 stars

Sad to say this was a total flop for me.

I read Ling Ma's Severance a couple of years ago and while, admittedly, it was not my favourite book ever, I still remember thinking that it had a lot of potential, and that it boded well for Ma's future releases. For that reason, I went into Bliss Montage cautiously optimistic, hoping that maybe what didn't work for me in a novel would work better in a short story collection. Needless to say, my hopes did not pan out.

I'm tempted to say I had two "issues" with Bliss Montage--one with its narrative voice, and one with its storytelling--but really these are less "issues" and more fundamental problems with the collection's writing as a whole. First, Ma's stories are all almost tonally identical; there is so little variety in their narrative voices. It feels like every story more or less has the same melancholic, impassive narrator: lost women who are Going Through It to various degrees but whose dry, flat narration makes you feel like they're all responding to their particular issues in the same way. On principle, I don't mind more distant or inscrutable narrators, but when every single story feels like it's a slight variation on one kind of narrator, then the collection starts to feel very one-note, and the stories start to blur together. This type of narrator might work in a novel with one POV because you have no other narrator to compare them to, but when I read a short story collection, I'm evaluating it on different terms than I would a novel: every story needs to distinguish itself, to stand on its own two feet. Narrative voice is one very noticeable way to do this--it's great when it's done well, but when it's not, as was the case here, it becomes very obvious very quickly.

So much for tone; where I run into issues next is in the actual storytelling: I found the stories of Bliss Montage to be opaque and just really unsatisfying. I've liked collections with more elusive short stories before (Meng Jin's Self-Portait with Ghost is one recent example that comes to mind); when done well, I think their opacity makes you gravitate towards them all the more, motivated in your attempts to try to see them more clearly. Bliss Montage's stories, though, shut me out rather than drew me in. I just couldn't for the life of me figure out what these stories were trying to say. I would start a story, and it would feel like it was going somewhere interesting, and then it would just end. The parts were somewhere in there, but the execution of the whole pretty much always fell flat for me.

Thematically, I'm not sure what this collection was going for. The synopsis says these stories are "eight wildly different tales," and I'm inclined to agree with that, though not really in a positive sense. I don't need every short story collection I read to be thematically cohesive--in a way, one of the attractions of short story collections is precisely the fact that they don't need to be thematically cohesive as a novel would; they give you the latitude to dip in and out of very different narratives without the investment that a longer piece of writing would ask from you. But even with all this in mind, the stories of Bliss Montage felt so disparate to me--a fact that was made even worse by the tonal similarity issue. So the stories all read like they're coming from the same narrator--or same kind of narrator--but the narratives themselves all feel so random. It was like I was reading random stories that were all being filtered through the same subjectivity, so even though the stories themselves were very different, they still ended up feeling very similar. Everything stood out, but also nothing stood out. It was a real lose-lose situation.

One last thing: I was so frustrated by how these stories' endings almost always left me hanging. Again, I don't categorically dislike vague or open-ended stories, but when every story ends right in the middle of things, it starts getting very annoying. It felt like these stories ratcheted up the tension, and then just went nowhere with it--the narrative equivalent of going up a rollercoaster without any of the emotional release of the actual going down part.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed this collection, but I'm also not discounting it as a whole because there were some glimmers here and there of things that I liked, or at least found interesting. The writing, for one, is occasionally sharp and perceptive, and I did end up highlighting a few passages that I thought were well written or insightful. There were also two stories that I think had some compelling themes, specifically "G" (about how women relate to their bodies, especially as those relationships tie into family, friendships, and culture) and "Pecking Duck" (about mother-daughter relationships and how they're [mis]translated in fiction). That's about all I have to say in terms of positives, though.

Anyway, I was really looking forward to this. It sounded so cool, and then I read the first story and was like "ok this is weird, but let's see where the collection is going," and then...it never went anywhere.

Thanks so much to FSG for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!

Some of most loved short story collections lean hard into speculative and surreal situations that allow an author to make commentary on our current reality. Ma does this in <i>Bliss Montage</i>, leaning hard into the Asian immigrant and female identities.

My favorite stories included “Los Angeles”, where a woman lives with all her 100 ex-boyfriends, and “G”, which showed what a toxic frenemies relationship changing under the influence of a drug that makes the user invisible. The final “Tomorrow” story lacked a speculative element, but I felt was a powerful look back at how two people can interpret the same experiences.

Overall, I thought the collection were fresh albeit dark. I hold back from 5-star because I felt quite a few of the endings simply faded away; I was hoping they’d leave a bit more of a punch.

Also - love the cover. I’d totally pick it up in a bookstore display.

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in exchange for an honest review.