Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, the Young Lions Fiction Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. Her work has appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Ninth Letter, The Chicago Reader and others. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and an AB from the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.
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SeveranceA Novel
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
Severance:A Novel -
SeveranceA Novel
He was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he said: Before this, I wouldn’t consider myself religious at all. But lately, I find the Bible to be very comforting. He cleared his throat. What do you think we all have in common in this group?
I don’t know, I said. I guess the most obvious thing is, we’re all survivors?
He smiled, professorially. I’d rephrase that to something more nuanced. We’re selected. The fact that we’re immune to something that took out most of the population, that’s pretty special. And the fact that you’re still here, it means something.
You mean, like natural selection?
I’m talking about divine selection.
Severance:A Novel -
SeveranceA Novel
The Gowers were having dinner once more, the second of dozens of dinners they would have that night. They bowed their heads and said grace, although they likely did not speak words but animal mumblings following the same rhythm, the same cadence, like humming a favorite tune. Words are often the first to go when you are fevered.
Hey. Hello? Someone was saying something. It was Rachel. Her nails were digging into my arm. You’re blanking out again.
I blinked, coming out of my trance. Sorry, I said.
You could lose yourself this way, watching the most banal activities cycle through on an infinite loop.
Severance:A Novel
“Tense and elegant, Ma’s writing here masterfully treads the line between genre fiction and literature. Part bildungsroman, part horror flick, Severance thrillingly morphs into a novel about self-worth, about the kinds of value we place on our own lives.” —Larissa Pham, The Nation
"I recommend [Severance] unreservedly: it’s perfect for when you’re living in that space between “oh shit, what if the world ends” and “oh shit, what if the world doesn’t end”―and truly, who isn’t living in that space right now?" —Katie Yee, Lit Hub
"Shocking and ferocious . . . a fierce debut from a writer with seemingly boundless imagination . . . a wicked satire of consumerism and work culture . . . It's a stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring: This is the way the world ends, Ma seems to be saying, not with a bang but a memo." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org [on Severance]
Selected Works
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Ling Ma’s debut novel is a marvel of form that is also an utter joy to read. Her writing fuses disparate genres into hybrid supergenres: it is a zombie novel, a road movie, an immigrant novel, a mordant satire, a novel of first love. These forms offer a narrative lens through which Ma considers the troubled American present, including end-stage capitalism and especially cultural nostalgia, brilliantly conceived here as a fatal epidemic. Ma’s stunning intelligence and imagination inflect every page, but it’s the carefully wrought moments of heartbreak mixed with flickers of joy that linger the longest.