You turn the pages of "Bliss Montage," Ling Ma's new book of short stories, and find the world you thought you knew shaken up and rearranged.
A woman lives in a Los Angeles house that's stocked with of her former boyfriends. There's a recreational drug called "G" that makes people invisible, which seems fun at first, but winds up concealing other problems. Not what you'd expect from a figure from Himalayan folklore, now is it? MA: I think there is a sort of emotional sensibility connecting all of these stories, but they are quite disparate. They're mostly about relationships. And I wrote most of these stories while in hibernation during the first year of the pandemic.
MA: Many of these stories started off as sketches that I had in my files just for years and years. The problem was that they were - felt very emotional to me, but the emotions would kind of volcanically gush forth and then overtake the story and just scar it completely.
MA: And I found that during the pandemic, I at least had sort of the critical distance of time to look at them in a more detached manner. Two old friends, last night together before one moves away - they take it together and range around Manhattan's Upper West Side. MA: Reading We would touch strangers discreetly, feathering down their cowlicks. We would eavesdrop on conversations, interjecting dialogue. We would float objects in the air, distorting others' fields of reality.
In more destructive moods, we would just flat-out damage property, fling apparel out of Urban Outfitters. We never felt guilty, as long as it was a chain. We would follow people home, go up in their elevators and into their apartments. That last thing, I like to do alone. I could feel Bonnie's hand reaching for mine. If you're taking "G" with someone, it's a good idea to hold hands so that you know where the other person is, if only to tether each other to the earth. Tonight, the sensation was headier than I'd remembered.
