Many characters are also-like both Candace and Ma herself-first-generation Chinese immigrants who move to the U.S. There are characters, like Severance’s discouraged protagonist Candace, who grapple with the ends of relationships or endure soul-curdling jobs.

In tone, the stories bear pleasant resemblance to Severance, with their wry humor and cultural savvy. “And by the time I finished it, his human suit lay crumpled on the floor, cleaved in two by a zipper seam, to reveal a shiny, sweat-dampened abominable snowman.” “What he did was, he gave me a glass of water,” she writes. The narrator of “Yeti Lovemaking” goes home with a man she meets in a wine bar, only to discover that he is, in fact, a mythical, snow-dwelling ape. The narrator of the opening story, “Los Angeles,” lives with her husband, children, and 100 ex-boyfriends, whom she carts around in a Porsche 911 Turbo S “as if it were a clown car.” In “G,” two women take a drug that makes them invisible. Ma takes these mundane episodes and turns them into dreamscapes of subtly fractured logic and absurd literalism.

Ma’s latest book is Bliss Montage, a collection of eight oddball short stories that put a surreal twist on run-of-the-mill contemporary experiences: two childhood friends grow apart in adulthood, a woman has trouble letting go of an abusive relationship, a couple in a rough patch goes on a vacation. In early 2020, the book saw a resurgence in sales as the plot quickly took on a new significance: whispers of an airborne pathogen, Shen Fever, circulating in China Shen Fever’s slow, unstoppable creep across borders and around the globe anxious New Yorkers handing out N-95 masks in office buildings once-bustling Manhattan roadways growing eerily quiet and empty of pedestrians.

Its reviewers hailed Ma’s incisive satirization of corporate life, marveling at her ability to capture, with wisdom and humor, a quintessential millennial paradox: one cannot experience true freedom while bound to the conditions of capitalism, nor can they experience true freedom without somehow acquiring capital.

The zombie apocalypse novel came out to glowing reviews in 2018, nabbing the prestigious Kirkus Fiction Prize and a Whiting Award, along with seats on several best-of-the-year lists. With her debut novel, Severance, Ling Ma established herself as something of a literary prophet.

Bliss montage paperback