What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In BLISS MONTAGE, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything --- if you bury yourself alive. These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.

Candace Chen is a first-generation American who manages the overseas production of specially designed Bibles. She’s so dedicated to her work that she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions begins sweeping the globe. When her free-spirited boyfriend announces that he’s leaving New York, she moves into her abandoned office, sending taskmaster emails in an attempt to fulfill a lucrative contract. But as Shen Fever spreads, she eventually flees her decimated city, joining a small band of fellow survivors led by a power-hungry IT expert named Bob. Sustained by foraged junk food and Xanax, they encounter the wrenching sight of fever-stricken zombies who are trapped in repetitive, mundane acts of daily life.