And in “G,” two friends experiment with a designer drug that turns whoever takes it invisible. In “Los Angeles,” a woman shares a large house in Hollywood Hills with her husband, their kids, and 100 of her ex-boyfriends. Like its predecessor, Ma’s new book is bizarre and entrancing, seeming to cement her reputation as one of the country’s most imaginative authors of fiction. She spent 2020 and beyond working on the stories in “Bliss Montage,” her collection published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ma didn’t spend too much time reflecting on her apparent ability to see the future, though. Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more “I definitely didn’t think I was predicting the future, but I was maybe picking up on things from my experience about how I felt a pandemic would go - which is that capitalism will be prioritized above all.”
“I can’t say that I’m clairvoyant,” Ma says via telephone from her Chicago home. Candace’s employer, like a lot of other businesses, is reluctant to acknowledge the pandemic, preferring to focus on its bottom line. But Ling Ma’s was weirder than most.Ī year and a half before Covid-19 hit the U.S., Ma published her first novel, “Severance.” The book told the story of Candace Chen, a young woman working a dead-end publishing job when a mysterious virus, first observed in China, paralyzes the world. Though the image references a story, ‘Orange,’ that theme of compromised pleasure can be found throughout the book as a whole.Nobody had a normal pandemic. “The photo of sheathed oranges under what looks like fluorescent lighting…the impression is one of compromised pleasure, which I thought juxtaposed the title nicely. A rootlessness pulses through Ma’s women, both a repulsion of the male gaze and a craving for validation. “I like that it’s stark and clean but a little bit joyless,” a nod to the collection’s anomie, reminiscent as much of Kate Braverman as Gish Jen. The image “was the designer’s idea,” Ma notes. The composition is straightforward but subtle, with bold type set against a cellophaned package of oranges you’d find in a market or deli. In an exclusive, Oprah Daily reveals the cover for Ma’s highly anticipated collection of short fiction, Bliss Montage, which builds on her earlier themes but also charts its own stylistic path, boring deep into her characters’ interior lives. A genre-bending novel that melded social satire with dystopian elements, Severance won that year’s Kirkus Prize for fiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Ling Ma’s debut, Severance, blazed across the literary landscape when it was published to wide acclaim in 2018.
0 kommentar(er)
