Bliss Montage, Ling Ma
Bliss Montage, Ling Ma
List: $22.99 | Sale: $16.09
Club: $11.49

Bliss Montage
Stories

Author: Ling Ma

Narrator: Katharine Chin

Unabridged: 6 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/13/2022


Synopsis

"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.

About Ling Ma

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Chicago with her family.

About Katharine Chin

Katharine Chin is a Taiwanese American actor and producer based in New York. She trained as an actor at UC San Diego, Steppenwolf West, and received her MFA in acting at The New School. Katharine has recorded over 75 audiobooks for publishers like Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, and more. She is a three-time Audie Awards finalist and has received three AudioFile Earphones Awards.As an actor, Katharine has performed on stages and screens in California and New York. As a producer, Katharine develops films, audio fiction, and theatre; she is co-artistic director of The Nobodies Collective, a new works development group in New York City. Across all her work, Katharine is drawn to stories that are delightful, subtly subversive, and in dogged pursuit of our shared humanity. She draws inspiration for her narration from nature, reading (science, current affairs, literary, comedy, are favorite genres), and by carving out time for being human (taking the kids to school, walking around town to do small errands but also to people watch and potentially bump into friends).Katharine’s narration style bends and stretches across genres, but the undercurrent is always grounded, deeply felt, and emotionally truthful.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma

i love ling ma and i want to kiss her on the face but that seems like a pretty major overstep so instead i'll just read everything she writes. mini reviews for each story like i always do for collections when my weary brain allows me! STORY 1: LOS ANGELES immediately i don't think i can review every on......more

‘It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.’ I’m still uncertain if I exist in the same reality as I did before reading these stories but, if not, I don’t want to go back. A surreal and startling collection, Bliss Montage by Ling Ma is a true tr......more

Goodreads review by fatma

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 M......more


Awards

  • New Yorker Best Books of the Year
  • Powell's Best Books of the Year
  • Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
  • Library Journal Best Books of the Year
  • National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
  • National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner
  • Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year