In “A Woman’s View ,” Basinger writes: “And there is one unique convention that almost never appears anywhere except in a woman’s film, the Happy Interlude.

In the acknowledgments, Ma says that the title of this collection comes from the film historian Jeanine Basinger. And perhaps that’s what Marie is doing when she gives a lecture on “the space of fantasy” in “Stalker” and “The Wizard of Oz,” or engages with an obnoxious and condescending male colleague: moving closer toward a multiplicity of the self, allowing for possibility instead of stagnancy. “The sanest way forward - you have to learn how to split yourself up into other selves, like an earthworm,” her mentor advised her years earlier, when she was about to graduate. When she attempts to bring flowers back from this other space, they disintegrate, emphasizing the idea that we can’t inhabit multiple realities at the same time. In “Office Hours,” a film and media studies professor named Marie learns that, in her office closet, there’s a portal to another reality she refers to as the chamber, a place she escapes to for cigarette breaks. The acts of looking and being seen come up repeatedly in these pages, as does the idea of concealment. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. “It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. “It doesn’t take much to come into your own all it takes is someone’s gaze,” Beatrice thinks. That’s the case for Beatrice, whose self-image is wrapped up in the feedback of her friend Bonnie. You can go anywhere, unimpeded by the microaggressions of strangers, the obligatory, waterlogged civilities of friends and acquaintances.” But disembodiment can also be confusing for those whose identities are shaped by the views of others. It lifts the tiny anvil of self-consciousness. “No one looks at you, no one assesses you. “Do you know how easily the world yields to you when you move through it in an invisibility cocoon?” Ma writes. In one, “Los Angeles,” a woman lives with her 100 ex-boyfriends, including a man who abused her in another, “G,” a pill makes people invisible, allowing them to experience life without the constraints of a body. Ma’s new short story collection, “ Bliss Montage,” shares some of the themes she explored in her debut, including identity and the immigrant experience, but most of these stories are uncanny and haunting.

Bliss montage paperback