Bliss Montage

What happens when fantasy rips through the fabric of the everyday? When the dream becomes the only way to see what’s real—and that awakening might be the end of us?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma delivers eight uncanny stories that drift between the surreal and the heartbreakingly familiar. A woman shares her home with every ex-boyfriend she’s ever had. A friendship curdles around a drug that turns you invisible. A ritual promises to cure any pain—if you’re willing to be buried alive.

Through tales of love and estrangement, motherhood and memory, connection and loss, Ma explores how the absurd and the ordinary mirror each other—how fantasy, in all its strangeness, might be the truest reflection of our lives.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.