flâneur

The Post-American Surreal - Dissent Magazine

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In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma seeks to re-enchant a world whose catastrophes have grown monotonously real.

Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, 240 pp. Ling Ma might be best known as the writer who predicted COVID-19. Her debut novel, Severance , which came out in the summer of 2018, is about a global pandemic originating from a virus in China. Set amid the backdrop of total social collapse, Severance follows the desultory wanderings of Candace Chen, a twenty-something Chinese American millennial who works a monotonous office job and lives in Brooklyn. After the virus functionally turns everyone into zombies, Candace decides to move into her office—dissolving the bound

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