story - a voice Ma suggests might be fundamentally out of reach to the second-generation (and 1.5-generation, like Ma herself) kids writing those works.īliss Montage, available September 13, gets its title from historian Jeanine Basinger, who coined the term in her 1993 book, A Woman’s View, as a way to describe a cinematic interlude of women’s pleasure.

Ma underpins the fantastical with complicated emotional relationships, like the frenemy-ship between two Chinese American girls who take invisibility drugs in “G.” Even in the collection’s two realist stories, characters attempt the unthinkable and the impossible: The narrator of “Oranges” follows an abusive ex around after spotting him in a grocery store, and in “Peking Duck,” a woman tries to capture her immigrant mother’s voice for an M.F.A. Surrealism is never a gimmick in Bliss Montage instead, it seeps nonchalantly into ordinary life: a woman and her husband live in a mansion with her hundred ex-boyfriends a woman sleeps with a yeti another falls pregnant and vacations to Miami with a virile baby arm hanging out of her.

“This book is a lot warmer and more mammal-like.” “ Severance feels a little bit cooler and more reptilian to me,” Ma tells me.

By comparison, she wrote most of her new short-story collection, Bliss Montage, in creative bursts during the pandemic, crafting speculative premises out of her most anxiety-laced dreams. She started Severance while working as a Playboy fact-checker in 2012, drafting it over several summers and taking inspiration from her string of thankless office jobs. When the author’s critically acclaimed debut, Severance - a wry crossover between office satire and mass-infection dystopia - came out in 2018, Ma never anticipated the second wave of attention it would get a year later when dystopia became reality. Photo-Illustration: The Cut Photo: Anjali Pinto, Courtesy of FSG

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