Ange Mlinko

Where you have​ a girl and a looking-glass, or – in the case of one of Eley Williams’s short stories – a woman who sees her reflection in the automated glass doors of an office building that one morning won’t open for her, the ghost of Lewis Carroll is never far away. In her perplexed despair at being unable to enter her workplace, the narrator turns around and sees...

In the Met Cloisters​ in Manhattan, in a gallery of illuminated manuscripts, are Gothic reliefs of boxwood and bone, some so tiny that magnifying lenses must have been used to carve them. One such boxwood carving, c.1500, is shaped like the letter P. It opens on a hinge, like a locket, and the image inside shows the life of the apostle Philip in six tondos. Apparently it was a talisman of...

Is Rachel Cusk’s​ new book a novel, a series of essays or a philosophical inquiry? Parade sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written, a punctus contra punctum, made up of stories that invert themselves in a dialectical fashion, propelled by a set of antinomies: male and female, parents and children, hardness and...

Jo Ann Beard’s​ Festival Days appeared in 2021; The Boys of My Youth in 1998. Republished together as her Collected Works (the book excludes her 2011 novel In Zanesville), they register the two-decade gap between the younger writer who mined her past for stories that read like memoir, and the older one who delves into the lives of others for essays that read like fiction. Shouldn’t...

A crown decayed or unfinished. Disarticulated bricks. An echo.

The cannon face the rolling breakers,aiming at the line where sky and sea collude.What do they defend? The wild enclosure,which for two centuries has lived on rain.

Sixteen million bricks encircle sixteen acres.There are no nymphs where there is no plenitudeof springs, though the sand is quite purethat can’t take the imprint of...