Before you swallow the seashell-shaped pill, you take off your makeup and strip naked vulnerability is the gateway to freedom. But you can also knock drinks off tables at sidewalk bistros or grope one another under cover of temporary irresponsibility. The side effects remind us of other lettered drugs, including E and K: “You walk around with a lesser gravity, a low-helium balloon the day after a birthday party.” You shed weight via raging diarrhea - literal body loss. After starting with two unfocused stories, the collection takes flight with “G,” about two women in a dissolving friendship who spend their last night living in the same city high on a drug that makes them invisible. Ma rides a good concept when she finds one. The title and Ma’s name are ruffled too, as if the author herself were shrink-wrapping delicious pleasure into a denatured product. On the cover of “Bliss Montage,” clear plastic clings to the nubbled curves of oranges, suffocating all that sunshine-y zing. Ma tells us what it looks like because she knows it matters. It’s a story collection “with a vaguely Chinese cover image of persimmons in a Ming dynasty bowl.” The image implies tradition and delicacy, pretty stories of domestic imbalance and clichéd Eastern promises of good fortune. In “Peking Duck,” one of the standout stories in Ling Ma’s collection, “ Bliss Montage,” a young writer presents an early copy of her new book to her mother.

One of my former editors once told me not to mention a book’s cover in a review - that it cheapened the words inside by tying them to the work of the publicity and marketing buzzards. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Bliss montage review