Ma’s protagonists are all fascinated with the possibility of using narrative to fall out of narrative they each try to follow some odd quirk of storytelling into an alternate story and an alternate life. “Fiction can be a space for an alternate self,” an English professor informs a class in “Office Hours,” one of the stories in Ling Ma’s new collection Bliss Montage. 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.The author’s latest collection tries to escape the market and literary clichés-but is this a cliché in itself?
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. 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. 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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