Career
Ma's debut novel,Severance, is described as "a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after,but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment." [10] Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror,and partially office satire. [11] It follows the novel's narrator in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly fever that has killed almost everyone in the US. [12] An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize,the Graywolf Prize. [13]
Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy ,a job she held from 2009 to 2012. [14] It began as a short story,written in her office during her last few months there;after her layoff,it became a novel which she wrote while living on severance pay. [15] She took four years to write it, [11] and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program. [16] Ma said she "felt pressured to write a traditional immigration novel" while in the MFA program at Cornell,but instead decided to write about otherness and alienation via the trope of zombie apocalypse. [8]
Ma has also published short stories in Granta , Playboy ,and the Chicago Reader . [17] Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022 The New Yorker Fiction Issue. [18] Her first collection of short stories,Bliss Montage,was published in September 2022. [19] The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. [20]
She is the recipient of a 2023 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. [21]
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