Bliss Montage Audiobook By Ling Ma cover art

Bliss Montage

Stories

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Bliss Montage

By: Ling Ma
Narrated by: Katharine Chin
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $14.99

Buy for $14.99

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

"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 Anthologies & Short Stories Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism Short Stories Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt Chinese Fiction

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
All stars
Most relevant  
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.

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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The stories are very novel. I like the drug setting a lot and I think the symbolism is relatable.

Audio defect is annoying

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Loved every story.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Definitely was sold on this book after about one minute in. It was fun, funny, well written and very creative.

Such wonderfully told stories

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Came here from Severance. These were all excellent but I'll re-listen to Peking Duck for years to come.

Peking Duck

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent snippet stories full of intrigue and emotion, also really enjoyed the narrator as well

Beautiful, strange work

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Audiobook is defective

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A book full of middles. Not my favorite. I needed some more to the stories or at least some resolution.

Very imaginative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Awful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Don’t Recommend

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews