RaveTor.comWritten with straightforward uncanniness that only serves to confound fundamental issues of belonging (but where?), alienation (from whom?) and the ambivalence symptomatic to late-stage capitalism (ubiquitous), it’s not so much a topical departure from Ma’s debut novel as it is a formal one ... This boundary between fabulation and reality is even more thinly-pressed ... Bliss Montage is a series of curtailed snapshots, painting the contours of small lives in broad strokes. Reproductions of crystalline moments, just slightly out of focus. Like the zoomed-in oranges on the book’s cover, submerged under a glaze of plastic, Ma’s stories effortlessly gloss the absurd over the quotidian, holding perfect equilibrium between what is realistic and what’s so bluntly, obviously bizarre as to feel real ... I blasted through this book in a day and couldn’t stop; less a feverish dream state than akin to being buoyed along by a current of shallow, ambient fantasy. Ma’s prose is crisp and lucid, but her stories have a soft, relaxed posture, sifting through direct descriptive information, then perforated by phrases of intense imagistic clarity.
