Ling Ma’s debut novel, published in 2018, opens at a moment when the majority of Earth’s inhabitants have been stricken with a fungus that dooms them endlessly to repeat such familiar tasks as getting dressed, setting the table, or sending email. Described by one critic as a zombie apocalypse novel crossed with an immigrant novel crossed with a coming-of-age novel, Severance is all of these in a form that’s compulsively readable. It’s also a love song to New York City.
The truth? While browsing in a bookstore, we picked up Severance on account of its eye-catching cover. Then we read the entrancing opening sentence. When we took it up to the counter to pay, the clerk said, “That’s the best book I read all year.”
There’s a less cheeky answer, too. For one thing, Severance is a horror story about a global pandemic that no longer seems as far-fetched as it once might have. In this novel, the real danger is posed not by zombies but by late capitalism — the cruelty and alienation it foists on overly pliant, unreflective workers.
Sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover.
Born in China, Ling Ma grew up in Utah and Kansas and earned an MFA from Cornell University. Severance won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award. Ma’s second book, a collection of stories titled Bliss Montage, is set to be published in September. She lives in Chicago.
“I think decidedly that Candice is not heroic. I just wanted to show an employee, a worker, someone who follows directions to maybe their absurd end,” says Ling Ma in her three-question Living Writers podcast.