It would be a disservice to Ling Ma and the merit of “Bliss Montage” to live in the shadow of “Severance,” but it’s impossible to discuss the former without mentioning the latter. And while “Severance” centers on the capitalist hellscape of millennial professional life, “Bliss Montage” expands itself into every personal, romantic and political nightmare of this generation. Each short story in the aptly-named collection “Bliss Montage” taps into a specific collective truth and turns it into a hysteric fever dream or outright nightmare. Though the image references a story, ‘Orange,’ that theme of compromised pleasure can be found throughout the book as a whole.While Ling Ma has already proven herself to be a dazzling storyteller after her first novel “ Severance,” her debut short story collection intuitively breaks into the universal anxieties of modern life. “The photo of sheathed oranges under what looks like fluorescent lighting…the impression is one of compromised pleasure, which I thought juxtaposed the title nicely. A rootlessness pulses through Ma’s women, both a repulsion of the male gaze and a craving for validation.
“I like that it’s stark and clean but a little bit joyless,” a nod to the collection’s anomie, reminiscent as much of Kate Braverman as Gish Jen. The image “was the designer’s idea,” Ma notes.
The composition is straightforward but subtle, with bold type set against a cellophaned package of oranges you’d find in a market or deli. In an exclusive, Oprah Daily reveals the cover for Ma’s highly anticipated collection of short fiction, Bliss Montage, which builds on her earlier themes but also charts its own stylistic path, boring deep into her characters’ interior lives. A genre-bending novel that melded social satire with dystopian elements, Severance won that year’s Kirkus Prize for fiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Ling Ma’s debut, Severance, blazed across the literary landscape when it was published to wide acclaim in 2018.
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