Ling Ma

Ling Ma (b. 1983) published Severance in 2018 — a novel about a fungal pandemic that turns people into zombies of routine, going through the motions of their lives in an endless loop — and then watched the world catch up with her fiction in 2020. The novel’s vision of plague as a metaphor for the deadening repetitions of late capitalism made it one of the most re-read and discussed novels of the COVID era, but its power does not depend on its accidental prescience. Severance is a genuinely original work: a novel about immigration, labor, memory, and the immigrant’s particular relationship to American consumer culture, told through a pandemic premise that reveals how thin the line between living and merely functioning has always been.

Life and Career

Ling Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian Province, China, and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child, growing up in Utah and Kansas — far from the Chinese American communities of the coasts, in a landscape of suburban sameness that would become essential material for her fiction. She studied at the University of Chicago and later completed an MFA at Cornell University. Before turning to fiction full-time, she worked in publishing and office jobs in New York — the particular kind of white-collar creative-adjacent work (production coordination, managing the manufacture of books that other people wrote) that forms the satirical heart of Severance.

Severance (2018)

Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) tells the story of Candace Chen, a Chinese-American woman working in New York as a production coordinator for a publisher that manufactures Bibles in Shenzhen. The supply chain is the novel’s most original metaphor: Candace’s job requires her to coordinate the production of sacred texts in Chinese factories by workers who will never read them, a process that encapsulates the disconnections of global capitalism — between labor and meaning, between production and consumption, between China and America.

When Shen Fever — a fungal infection originating in China — sweeps the world, turning victims into mindless creatures who repeat familiar routines until they die, Candace is one of the last people in New York. She photographs the empty city for a blog called NY Ghost, documenting the beauty and strangeness of a metropolis without people. She eventually joins a group of survivors led by Bob, a charismatic but increasingly authoritarian figure who leads them toward a promised settlement called “the Facility.”

The novel operates on multiple levels simultaneously. It is a pandemic thriller with genuine suspense. It is a satire of millennial office culture — open-plan offices, performative busyness, the pretense that administrative work is meaningful. It is an immigrant narrative about the loss of homeland, the guilt of leaving, and the ambivalent embrace of American life. And it is a meditation on what it means to be “alive” versus merely functioning — a question that the Shen Fever makes literal but that Candace was already asking before the pandemic.

The fever’s central horror — it traps people in repetitive behavior, so that a fevered victim might fold laundry or set a table forever — is barely distinguishable from the routines of cubicle work and consumer habit that define pre-pandemic life. That ambiguity is the novel’s sharpest insight: if the fevered are those who repeat familiar actions without awareness, how different are they from the unfevered, who do the same thing but call it living?

Severance was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and it has been taught widely in universities as both literary fiction and pandemic literature.

Bliss Montage (2022)

Bliss Montage (FSG, 2022), her short story collection, confirmed Ma’s range and established the territory she occupies: uncanny realism, in which surrealist premises — presented deadpan, without explanation or justification — illuminate the emotional textures of immigrant life, female experience, and late-capitalist dislocation.

The stories are controlled with surgical precision. In “Office Hours,” a professor’s office contains a portal to another dimension. In “Peking Duck,” a woman keeps her ex-boyfriends in her home, invisible to everyone but her — a literalization of the emotional truth that past relationships persist, unseen, in the spaces we inhabit. In “Los Angeles,” a couple uses a cloak of invisibility to navigate the city — an immigrant’s fantasy of moving through American space without being seen or judged. In “Tomorrow,” a woman takes a drug that allows her to experience an alternate life, raising questions about choice, regret, and the lives not lived.

The collection won the Story Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Its stories demonstrate Ma’s distinctive method: take an impossible premise, treat it as ordinary, and use it to reveal something true about how people actually feel.

Themes and Critical Standing

Ma’s great subject is the relationship between repetition and meaning — the question of when routine becomes ritual, when habit becomes imprisonment, and when the repetitions of daily life (commuting, working, consuming) cross the line from living to merely surviving. Her fiction is set at that crossing point, which is why Severance resonated so powerfully during a pandemic that forced millions of people to examine the routines they had been performing without thought.

She is compared to Kazuo Ishiguro (for the deadpan treatment of extraordinary premises), to George Saunders (for the satirical surrealism), and to Jenny Offill (for the precision and compression).

Key Works

• Severance (2018)
• Bliss Montage (2022) — Story Prize

Collecting Ma

Severance first edition (FSG, 2018) signed brings $100–$300; demand spiked dramatically during the pandemic and has remained elevated. Unsigned first editions in fine condition bring $30–$75. Bliss Montage first edition (FSG, 2022) signed brings $50–$125. Ma signs at events and festivals. Her bibliography is still very short (two books in fourteen years), making first editions of both titles the core collected items. Given the quality of her work and the trajectory of her reputation, debut copies are likely to appreciate.