Ange Mlinko

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...

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...