Ling Ma Books in Order

Ling Ma was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. That background matters in her work, but not in a tidy or slogan-like way. Again and again, her fiction returns to people moving between places, languages, jobs, and versions of themselves.

Before she was known for fiction, she worked a lot of regular jobs.

Ma has said that she reviewed films, made sandwiches, scooped ice cream, and worked in media and publishing. One of those jobs was fact-checking at Playboy, which meant long hours of looking closely at other people's words. She earned her AB from the University of Chicago and later an MFA from Cornell, and that combination of office life and serious craft training shows up in the texture of her books.

Her path to a novel began at a desk. In 2012, while her company was downsizing, she started writing an apocalyptic short story during the last months of that office job. The material kept growing, and she finished the first draft a few years later. That project became Severance.

It was an office novel with the apocalypse folded into it.

Severance follows Candace Chen, a young woman who keeps going to work as Shen Fever empties New York. What makes the book stick is not just the premise. Readers tend to remember the deadpan humor, the eerie repetition, and the way Ma links labor, consumer culture, immigration, grief, and survival without flattening any of them into a message. The novel was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Kirkus Prize, along with other early awards.

Her second book, Bliss Montage, opens things up even more. It is a story collection made of strange, memorable setups: a woman living with all her ex-boyfriends, a friendship built around a drug that makes people invisible, a ritual that asks what someone will endure to be remade. The stories are surreal, but the feelings inside them are familiar. Many of her protagonists are women trying to hold onto a usable identity inside messy relationships and unstable systems. Ma keeps asking how intimacy works, what people owe each other, and how much of a self can bend before it starts to split.

Short fiction has been a big part of her path too. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Granta, among other places, and some of it has been anthologized in major annual collections. If you like writers who can move from the very ordinary to the quietly bizarre in a single paragraph, that is a big part of her appeal.

She has described her interests in plain terms: labor, capitalism, the female body, and the Chinese American diaspora, plus the unstable border between everyday reality and the fantastical. On the page, that usually means concrete scenes rather than grand statements. A meeting runs too long. A family memory keeps changing shape. A body does something it should not do. A familiar room starts to feel slightly unreal.

Ma lives in Chicago and teaches at the University of Chicago, where she is an associate professor in English. In recent years her work has also brought her a Whiting Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Those honors tell you she has been widely recognized, but the better clue is the work itself: funny, unsettling, and very alert to the odd rituals that make up modern life.