Ling Ma
“The best part about starting out as a writer is the freedom to make anything you want, to experiment and take risks, adhering to or breaking whichever rules you choose. In the end, however, we are only ourselves, and it is the work we produce, even in its roughest drafts, that ultimately informs us what we’re trying to do.”
“A striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal . . . [Bliss Montage] stay[s] with you — evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility.”
“Remarkable . . . Bliss Montage delivers on the white-hot promise of [Ma’s] 2018 breakout.”
“Severance is the best work of fiction I’ve read yet about the millennial condition―the alienation and cruelty that comes with being a functional person under advanced global capitalism, and the compromised pleasures and irreducibly personal meaning to be found in claiming some stability in a terrible world. I love how, in this novel, doom is inevitable, and yet it comes so slowly you might not even notice it. Ling Ma has written one of my favorite novels of the year.”
“Ma’s writing about the jargon of globalized capitalism has a mix of humor and pathos that reminded me a little of Infinite Jest and a little of George Saunders.”
“[A] standout debut. Satiric and playful―as well as scary ...Ling Ma is an assured and inventive storyteller [and her novel] reflects on the nature of human identity and how much the repetitive tasks we perform come to define who we are. . . . A sardonic wake-up call.”
“[A] semi-surreal sendup of a workplace and its utopia of rules, not unlike Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End... Laced within Ma’s dystopian narrative is an arresting encapsulation of a first-generation immigrant’s nostalgia for New York . . . Severance evokes traces of . . . Joan Didion.”
Ling Ma's most recent book is Bliss Montage: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), which was named a National Indie Bestseller, a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), described as a “meticulous, caustic description of life in big cities and what happens when a terrible pandemic slowly annihilates most of the human population.” Severance won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Named a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of 2018, it has been translated into seven languages. Ling’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, Buzzfeed, and more. Her fellowships and awards include a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Whiting Award, and an NEA creative writing fellowship.
In an interview with NPR, Ling was asked how a story about the apocalypse became a story about capitalism: “This novel started as an apocalyptic sort of short story and I had a lot of fun sort of just knocking things over, destroying things ... just thinking about how the buildings might stop working, and how the public transit might slow down, and how people would have to stop working. To me, it was a very gleeful short story but there was also this undercurrent of anger and I tried to source that anger back to its origin which had to do with work, which had to do with capitalism.”
Ling was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah and Kansas. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. She has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.
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(c) Anjali Pinto
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