Though the image references a story, ‘Orange,’ that theme of compromised pleasure can be found throughout the book as a whole. “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. Severance Author Ling Ma Has a New Book, and Oprah Daily Has the Exclusive Cover Reveal 'Bliss Montage, Ma’s short-story collection, debuts in September. 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. 19 She is the recipient of a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction. 18 The collection was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Ling Ma’s debut, Severance, blazed across the literary landscape when it was published to wide acclaim in 2018. Her first collection of short stories, Bliss Montage, was published in September 2022.
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