Bliss Montage

Stories

De: Ling Ma

Narrado por: Katharine Chin

"Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection."- AudioFile

A new creation by the author of Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages.

What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2022 Ling Ma (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

Long-listed, 2022 New Yorker Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Powell's Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year

Audio defect is annoying

The stories are very novel. I like the drug setting a lot and I think the symbolism is relatable.

Ling Ma hooked me with Severance, and this collection doesn’t disappoint.

The story G is everything. The whole collection is wonderful, but this story should be in every high school curriculum. The structure, pacing, and vivid, grounding bits of detail are what I most love in her speculative fiction. It is not the extraordinary, but the mundane that makes her work so believable and her characters so alive. I read Severance shortly before COVID and her imagining of New York in a pandemic was eerily prescient in detail and attitude. She again creates a canvas of the familiar and then slips in the wildly fictitious detail like a dog pill wrapped in a bit of cheese. I couldn’t love her work more- she is the voice of her generation for me.

Peking Duck

Came here from Severance. These were all excellent but I'll re-listen to Peking Duck for years to come.

Loved every story.

Prescient, entirely unique, devastating and so often LOL funny…. And the performance is so on point, timing, tone - I couldn’t stop listening. A newly minted Ling Ma fan.

Such wonderfully told stories

Definitely was sold on this book after about one minute in. It was fun, funny, well written and very creative.

Beautiful, strange work

Excellent snippet stories full of intrigue and emotion, also really enjoyed the narrator as well

Audiobook is defective

Please note, as of September 21, 2022 this audiobook has numerous audio glitches where words and sometimes sentences are played twice at slightly different times which creates a weird / disorienting echo effect. It isn’t so bad that you can’t enjoy the stories. But it is occasionally quite distracting. Hopefully this book will be fixed soon. I have contacted audible about this issue, and please if you are interested in this book, do the same so we can get this book fixed.

I will update this review when I have confirmed that the book is fixed.

Very imaginative

A book full of middles. Not my favorite. I needed some more to the stories or at least some resolution.

Don’t Recommend

Most of the stories end without any indication of where the plot was supposed to end up - the audio itself was sentences you can tell were inserted post production. This book is heavy on poorly done symbolism.

Ugh

Felt like a slog through a depressing diary. Couldn’t finish it, and I did try. Each story was as bad as the one before.