You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play. Her hundred ex-boyfriends live in the largest but ugliest wing. The narrator of Los Angeles lives with her husband, their children, and the children’s au pairs in the east and west wings of their home. 13, 2022 Short stories from the author of Severance, winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction. To support our work buy a copy! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member. Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage Peels Back a Different Kind of Fantasy The speculative fiction collection excavates desire, not delusion. BLISS MONTAGE by Ling Ma RELEASE DATE: Sept. This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. You can buy Bliss Montage from the Big Issue shop on, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops. Ma’s collection is utterly captivating she figures the disassociation of modern life with deep intelligence. In Bliss Montage, Ma proves herself as an esteemed voice of the 21st century. Her characters often struggle to realise their desires perhaps because they are contending with systems that continually act to efface them. Dreamlike and unsettling, Ma’s stories are layered with emotional complexity.

In this masterpiece compiling stories within a story, the narrator, a second-generation Chinese-American writer, has her own story (about her mother’s experience as a nanny) painfully dissected, first by her MFA peers, then by her mother, who challenges this version of events. Throughout Peking Duck, Ma uses metatexts to pose questions about fictional ethics and the burden of representation. Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma is out now (Text, £10)

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