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."
Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire. An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize. Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for
Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012. 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. She took four years to write it, and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program. 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. Ma has also published short stories in
Granta,
Playboy, and the
Chicago Reader. Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022
The New Yorker Fiction Issue. Her first collection of short stories,
Bliss Montage, was published in September 2022. The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. She is the recipient of a 2023
Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. ==Works==