Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Bliss Montage

Stories

by Ling Ma

Narrator Katharine Chin

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Length 6 hours 13 minutes

Language English

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Bookseller recommendation

“I'm not a big fan of short story collections - I inevitably get bored halfway through - but I loved Ling Ma's debut novel Severance, so I gave Bliss Montage a chance. I burned through the whole thing in a single day. Every piece has its merits, but I'm still mulling over the toxic friendship at the center of the story G (not to mention the drug that renders its user invisible). I also particularly loved Peking Duck for its skillful construction, with one story nested inside another like so many Russian dolls. Overall, Bliss Montage reminded me of the power (and delight) of short form magical realism. Sometimes what a person needs is a small but potent dose of absurdity.”
— Ryan • Quail Ridge Books

Summary
About the author

"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.

Fiction Short Stories Fiction - Literary

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.