Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance (FSG, 2018) and the story collection Bliss Montage (FSG, 2022). Her writing has received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.
After the final throes of the relationship—the aimless arguments about the future, the listless waiting for his circular non–decision making, the studying of feminist tracts to recondition herself—she did not come away with nothing. She...