Things i am willing to do in order to receive this book: Significantly better than the sum of its parts, and the parts are damn good. i know i'm going to return to this one, countless times mentally and more than once for a reread. HELLO ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL METAPHOR THIS ONE NOT CLICHED AT ALL!!!!!Ī story about books and the themes of books and it has the themes and also more themes and also also also.įun recurring theme becoming apparent of the complexity of desire (i.e., a sense of dissatisfaction too elaborate to pin on any one thing) making happiness impossible in modern life.īrilliant and incisive, more knowing and intuitive on the subject of being young and getting older in the 21st century than just about anything i've ever read. This allegory is so satisfying (if a little clichéd) it's like having a treat. This doesn't have the same fervent originality as the first one but it's even more immersive and suffocating. this was too one of a kind, too striking, i'm speechless, and i have to do this EVERY TIME?! Immediately i don't think i can review every one of these. Mini reviews for each story like i always do for collections when my weary brain allows me! She lives in Chicago with her family.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. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, the Whiting Award and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah and Kansas. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar. 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. What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? From the acclaimed author of Severance comes a story collection that is breathtaking in its imaginative feat

Bliss montage paperback