The Post-American Surreal

Abstract:Ling Ma might be best known as the writer who predicted COVID-19. Her debut novel, Severance, which came out in the summer of 2018, is about a global pandemic originating from a virus in China. Set amid the backdrop of total social collapse, Severance follows the desultory wanderings of Candace Chen, a twenty-something Chinese American millennial who works a monotonous office job and lives in Brooklyn. After the virus functionally turns everyone into zombies, Candace decides to move into her office—dissolving the boundary between leisure and labor by working from home (or, rather, by making the workplace her home). During the start of lockdown, many readers fixated on how the novel's sciencefictional premise eerily resembled our own world. Severance had captured, with uncanny realism, the surprisingly mundane experience of living in a pandemic under late capitalism