Ma’s collection is utterly captivating she figures the disassociation of modern life with deep intelligence. Her characters often struggle to realise their desires perhaps because they are contending with systems that continually act to efface them. Dreamlike and unsettling, Ma’s stories are layered with emotional complexity. In this masterpiece compiling stories within a story, the narrator, a second-generation Chinese-American writer, has her own story (about her mother’s experience as a nanny) painfully dissected, first by her MFA peers, then by her mother, who challenges this version of events. Throughout Peking Duck, Ma uses metatexts to pose questions about fictional ethics and the burden of representation. 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.Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma is out now (Text, £10)
Read full overviewĪ new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages What happens when fantasy tears through 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 new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In Bliss Montage, Ling.
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