Ange Mlinko

The potential​ for drollery should be obvious: four females, confined in a luxury apartment on an upper floor of a Manhattan high-rise, moulder in rage and ennui when the head of household, Arnold, absconds to Paris with his new French girlfriend. The abandoned wife, J., swallows ‘fistfuls of Valium’ while staring bleakly out of the window. Monique, the young au pair, looking...

Now you see, Urania, where the amphitheatre was.They built it, like the ancient Greeks, all open plan.Provisioned with natural acoustics, the space betweenthe two largest outcrops accommodates a crowd

and brackets the constellations; Cancer’s clawsgrasp at heaven as the wind from Saskatchewanpours unstoppably through this pass, a scenestraight out of the fragment...

Maria Callas came to our banal climate, aged five,wearing her first pair of glasses, so that perhapsthe fizz of palms was the first thing to come into focus.

In time she might have seen the crucifix diveat Epiphany, when rain like a jeweller tapsgingerly into the crystal of a water crocus.

At five she was known as Mary Kalogeropoulos,and if I could, I would tell her how my relativeschanged their...

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...