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."[9]Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire.[10] It follows the novel's narrator in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly fever that has killed almost everyone in the US.[11] An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize.[12]
Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012.[13] 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.[14] She took four years to write it,[10] and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program.[15] 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.[7]
Ma has also published short stories in Granta, Playboy, and the Chicago Reader.[16] Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022 The New Yorker Fiction Issue.[17] Her first collection of short stories, Bliss Montage, was published in September 2022.[18] The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.[19]
^"2023 Prize Recipients". Windham Campbell Prizes 2023. Windham Campbell Prizes. Archived from the original on April 21, 2023. Retrieved April 21, 2023.