Bliss Montage: Stories

Love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home—in Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales that take on our everyday fears and fantasies. A woman lives in a mansion with her husband and all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship comes to its breaking point with the resurgence of a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient folk ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive. And in "Office Hours," winner of an O. Henry Prize, a film professor discovers a portal inside a closet. These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.