The Slippery Reality of Bliss Montage
Ling Ma’s stories seem to ask us to take a pause from thinking about both the future and the past, to settle down into the whirl of the montage, and maybe even enjoy it.
Ling Ma
The Disembodiment of Work in Severance and Several People Are Typing
Ling Ma and Calvin Kasulke’s novels explore the disembodiment of contemporary work culture as a grand coping mechanism, providing characters with a numbing, and even joyful, distraction from ongoing trauma.
The Act of Making a Home in Severance
Ling Ma’s 2018 novel is a story about what it means to make a life when one has been removed—whether willingly or by force—from one’s familiar surroundings, and the faith and perseverance required in order to call a new place home.
The Immigrant, The Worker, and The Zealot in Ling Ma’s Severance
Ling Ma brings post-apocalyptic zombie fiction, the Asian-American immigrant narrative, and anti-capitalist office satire together in her debut novel in which capitalism is—literally—a disease.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Los Angeles” by Ling Ma
In Marie-Helene Bertino’s “Edna in Rain” (reviewed in February), the narrator’s ex-lovers are literally raining from the sky, leaving her to deal with the surprising consequences. In Ling Ma’s “Los Angeles” (Granta), the narrator has similar problems with past lovers, leading to a wild exploration of memory’s hold on the present. In the first paragraph,…