Ling Ma was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. She attended the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and an editor. Her writing has appeared in Granta, VICE, Playboy, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, and other publications. A chapter of Severance received the 2015 Graywolf SLS Prize. She lives in Chicago.
Winner of the 2019 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award
Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
Winner of the 2019 Friends of American Writers First Prize in
Literature
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Shortlisted for the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for
Debut Speculative Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018
An NPR Best Book of 2018
An Elle Best Book of 2018
A Marie Claire Best Book of 2018
A Buzzfeed Best Book of 2018
A Refinery29 Best Book of 2018
A Jezebel Favorite Book of 2018
A Bustle Best Book of 2018
An Electric Lit Best Novel of 2018
A Lit Hub Best Book of 2018
A BookPage Best Book of 2018
A Bookish Best Book of 2018
A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018
A Chicago Review of BooksBest Book of 2018
A HuffPost Best Fiction Book of 2018
An Electric Literature Best Book of 2018
An A.V. Club Favorite Book of 2018
A Jezebel Favorite Book of 2018
A Vulture Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2018
Longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize
A Book of the Month Club Selection for December 2018
Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Award
New York Magazine Approval Matrix, "Highbrow Brilliant"
An Indie Next Great Reads Selection
A Southern Living Best New Book of Summer 2018
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2018
An Alma Favorite Book for Fall
A Nylon Best Book of Summer 2018
A Chicago Magazine Summer Reading Pick
A Library Journal Summer Fall Best Debut Novel
An April Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2018
A BookBub Laugh-Out-Loud Book of 2018
A Library Journal Debut With Credentials
A Refinery29 Best New Book of August 2018
A Greenlight Bookstore Pick in Brooklyn Paper "Severance is the
most gorgeously written novel I've read all year; when I finished
it, I immediately picked it up and read it all over again." --Jane
Hu, The New Republic "Severance is the best work of fiction I've
read yet about the millennial condition--the alienation and cruelty
that comes with being a functional person under advanced global
capitalism, and the compromised pleasures and irreducibly personal
meaning to be found in claiming some stability in a terrible world.
I love how, in this novel, doom is inevitable, and yet it comes so
slowly you might not even notice it. Ling Ma has written one of my
favorite novels of the year." --Jia Tolentino, New Yorker staff
writer "A satirical spin on the end times--kind of like The Office
meets The Leftovers." --Estelle Tang, Elle "[A] standout debut.
Satiric and playful--as well as scary . . . Ling Ma is an assured
and inventive storyteller [and her novel] reflects on the nature of
human identity and how much the repetitive tasks we perform come to
define who we are. . . . A sardonic wake-up call." --Maureen
Corrigan, Fresh Air, National Public Radio "[A] semi-surreal sendup
of a workplace and its utopia of rules, not unlike Joshua Ferris's
Then We Came to the End . . . Laced within Ma's dystopian narrative
is an arresting encapsulation of a first-generation immigrant's
nostalgia for New York . . . Severance evokes traces of . . . Joan
Didion." --Antonia Hitchens, The New York Times Book Review "How do
you fit a zombie novel inside an immigrant story inside a
coming-of-age tale? Ling Ma . . . accomplished this feat in her
gripping and original turducken of a novel . . . Fascinating."
--Trine Tsouderos, The Chicago Tribune "Ma's prose is, for the most
part, understated and restrained, somewhat in the manner of Kazuo
Ishiguro . . . Ma is at her most deft when depicting this kind of
severance: the amputation of the immigrant's past, preserved like a
phantom limb whose pain is haunted with absence." --Jiayang Fan,
The New Yorker "Gorgeously wacky." --Hillary Kelly, Vulture "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 "Ling Ma's extraordinary debut encompasses many
genres and might just be the first and only coming-of-age,
immigrant experience, anti-capitalist zombie novel you'll ever
need." --The Cut "Ma's writing about the jargon of globalized
capitalism has a mix of humor and pathos that reminded me a little
of Infinite Jest and a little of George Saunders." --Emily Witt,
The New Yorker "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 "Ling Ma's Severance . . . sneaks up on you from all sides:
it's an affecting portrayal of loss, a precise fictional evocation
of group dynamics, and a sharp character study of its protagonist,
Candace Chen." --Tobias Carroll, Tor.com "Ling Ma delivers a
fascinating coming-of-age novel, one full of millennial culture,
post-apocalyptic adventures, and, perhaps most exciting of all, a
zombie-like populace . . . Severance wonderfully demonstrates how
the lifestyles we lead now can have a great impact on our future."
--M. M. Silva, Zyzzyva "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 "A suspenseful adventure that doubles as a sly critique of
late capitalism." --Boris Kachka, Vulture
"Funny, frightening, and touching.... Ling Ma manages the
impressive trick of delivering a bildungsroman, a survival tale,
and satire of late capitalist millennial angst in one book, and
Severance announces its author as a supremely talented writer to
watch." --The Millions "As debut novels go, Severance is about as
original and assured as they come." --Laura Pearson, The Chicago
Tribune "If satirist Gary Shteyngart wrote his version of 2015
end-of-world breakout Station Eleven, it would be this compulsively
readable book." --Mind Body Green "Ling Ma's debut novel tackles
countless themes--immigration, work culture, family, capitalism,
and the confusing aimlessness of your early 20s--with a dry wit
that keeps the horrific digestible, the repetitive laughable, and
the pages turning." --Marie Claire "Astounding . . . Ma's
engrossing, masterfully written debut transforms the mundane into a
landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage
capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in
such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned."
--BookPage "Ling Ma's debut novel is a weird and funny story that
melds an end-of-the-world collapse of civilization with a sharp
critique of modern work culture, along with a dose of meditation on
grief and the immigrant experience." --Chris Kim, OZY "A
brilliantly unsettling dystopian novel following a young woman who
somehow escapes a fever epidemic and joins a cult-like group of
fellow survivors." --Bust "The book I loved most of all in 2018,
the queen of the stack (if you will), is Severance . . . It's I Am
Legend for the plugged-in, globally conscious, thinking woman. I
could not be more obsessed." --Siobhan Jones, Book of the Month
Club "Ma's writing is compelling and cogent, perfectly satirizing a
world that often feels beyond parody." --Nylon "[Severance is] a
book about work that puts the work in the context of globalization,
a book that is mordant and sad and full of quicksilver allegories.
I loved that book so much." --Lydia Kiesling, The Millions "Ma's
language does so much in this book, and its precision, its
purposeful specificity, implicates an entire generation. But what
is most remarkable is the gentleness with which Ma describes those
working within the capital-S System. What does it mean if a person
finds true comfort working as a 'cog' in a system they disagree
with? Is that comfort any less real?" --Buzzfeed "What Ma
accomplishes with her fever-stricken world is what sets Severance
apart. Rather than take the end of days as a chance for the usual
pontifications on societal collapse--most seemingly ignorant that
we built society from nothing the first time, and we would
certainly do it again--Ma uses the disaster trope for interrogation
on a scale small enough to lacerate." --B. David Zarley, Paste "A
satiric vision that takes in late capitalism, the immigrant
experience, and the anomie of early adulthood." --Library of
America "With exquisite pacing, Ling Ma alternates between
Candace's precarious present and her childhood as the daughter of
Chinese immigrants, and contemplates the possibility of a future in
a lonely, blasted world. Severance is a scathing portrait of a
society collapsing under its own ungovernable appetites, as well as
a haunting meditation on family inheritance and its loss." --Claire
Fallon, Huffington Post "Severance meets and exceeds the promise of
[its] exciting description. In many ways, Severance is a novel of
ideas--it artfully blends/bends genre, it boldly indicts global
capitalism, consumerism, and materialism--but every one of its
intellectual aims is deeply grounded in the richly felt experiences
of the narrator. --Joseph Scapellato, Electric Lit "For readers who
love their literary fiction with a dash of apocalypse, this one's
for you." --Bookish "Severance shares as much with Then We Came To
The End, Joshua Ferris' meditation on the failure of an advertising
agency, as it does with The Walking Dead; Ma plays with voice,
alternating between the first-person singular and plural to show
how easily an individual comes to identify as part of a collective
and how hard it is to have that group fall apart." --Samantha
Nelson, A.V. Club "Takes the milieu of the film Frances Ha and
mixes in a subdued zombie apocalypse. . . A clever and funny novel
that depicts modern urban ennui and a speculative post-apocalyptic
world equally well, while using its central contagion as a metaphor
to critique late capitalism, globalization, and nostalgia." --Matt
Stowe, Brooklyn Paper "I consumed [Severance] like a hungry fungal
spore in two days." --Molly Young "Ma is satiric about the
workplace, in a way that's less snobbish than Nell Zink but just as
funny and imaginative . . . All the best metaphors in the book are
cleverly crafted harbingers . . . Her dexterity in joking about
capitalism rivals the skill of the great Richard Powers." --Kaitlin
Philips, BookForum "Listen, are we just suggesting Severance to
everyone, because everyone in the office read and loved it? Yes,
sure. But also, post-apocalyptic novels are perfect crucibles for
imagining what happens when the rules we operate under break down."
--Electric Lit "Ling Ma's novel Severance is an astute combination
of workplace novel and apocalyptic tale. Smart and filled with
humanity, this debut is one of the year's best books."
--Large-Hearted Boy "This depiction of the Midwest feels
unexpectedly of our time, at a moment when coastal nostalgia for
the heartland has fixated as much on frontier sentimentalism
(prairie dresses, artisanal foods) as it has dead mall videos and
ruin porn." --Meghan O'Gieblyn, Lit Hub "A radically understated
debut novel . . . searingly underplayed." --Constance Grady, Vox
"This quirky satire of office culture . . . imagines what would
happen to a Chinese American workaholic if Manhattan were hit by a
sudden apocalypse." --Chicago Magazine "Blends two distinct
subgenres into a wholly original narrative." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn "A
biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of
what comes after . . . [Ma] knows her craft, and it shows. [Her
protagonist] is a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and
steely strength. . . . Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory
and the immigrant experience. Smart, funny, humane, and superbly
well-written." --Kirkus, starred review "Embracing the genre but
somehow transcending it, Ma creates a truly engrossing and
believable anti-utopian world. Ma's extraordinary debut marks a
notable creative jump by playing on the apocalyptic fears many
people share today." --Booklist, starred review "In this shrewd
postapocalpytic debut, Ma imagines the end times in the world of
late capitalism, marked by comforting, debilitating effects of
nostalgia on its characters . . . The novel's strength lies in Ma's
accomplished handling of the walking dead conceit to reflect on
what constitutes the good life. This is a clever and dextrous
debut." --Publishers Weekly "A smart, searing expos� on the perils
of consumerism, Google overload, and millennial malaise . . . an
already established audience will be eager to discover this work."
--Library Journal
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