Preview
  • Bliss Montage

  • Stories
  • By: Ling Ma
  • Narrated by: Katharine Chin
  • Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (65 ratings)

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Bliss Montage

By: Ling Ma
Narrated by: Katharine Chin
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Publisher's summary

"Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection."- AudioFile

A new creation by the author of
Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages.

What happens when fantasy tears 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 woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2022 Ling Ma (P)2022 Macmillan Audio
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Critic reviews

Long-listed, 2022 New Yorker Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Powell's Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Library Journal Best Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year

Long-listed, 2022 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year

What listeners say about Bliss Montage

Average customer ratings
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Peking Duck

Came here from Severance. These were all excellent but I'll re-listen to Peking Duck for years to come.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Audio defect is annoying

The stories are very novel. I like the drug setting a lot and I think the symbolism is relatable.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Ling Ma hooked me with Severance, and this collection doesn’t disappoint.

The story G is everything. The whole collection is wonderful, but this story should be in every high school curriculum. The structure, pacing, and vivid, grounding bits of detail are what I most love in her speculative fiction. It is not the extraordinary, but the mundane that makes her work so believable and her characters so alive. I read Severance shortly before COVID and her imagining of New York in a pandemic was eerily prescient in detail and attitude. She again creates a canvas of the familiar and then slips in the wildly fictitious detail like a dog pill wrapped in a bit of cheese. I couldn’t love her work more- she is the voice of her generation for me.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Loved every story.

Prescient, entirely unique, devastating and so often LOL funny…. And the performance is so on point, timing, tone - I couldn’t stop listening. A newly minted Ling Ma fan.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Such wonderfully told stories

Definitely was sold on this book after about one minute in. It was fun, funny, well written and very creative.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Beautiful, strange work

Excellent snippet stories full of intrigue and emotion, also really enjoyed the narrator as well

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Audiobook is defective

Please note, as of September 21, 2022 this audiobook has numerous audio glitches where words and sometimes sentences are played twice at slightly different times which creates a weird / disorienting echo effect. It isn’t so bad that you can’t enjoy the stories. But it is occasionally quite distracting. Hopefully this book will be fixed soon. I have contacted audible about this issue, and please if you are interested in this book, do the same so we can get this book fixed.

I will update this review when I have confirmed that the book is fixed.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Very imaginative

A book full of middles. Not my favorite. I needed some more to the stories or at least some resolution.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Awful

This is not literature. It’s gibberish. Maybe she made Adam read her manuscript? Yikes. This was painful and didn’t have an ounce of craft.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Don’t Recommend

Most of the stories end without any indication of where the plot was supposed to end up - the audio itself was sentences you can tell were inserted post production. This book is heavy on poorly done symbolism.

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