Ange Mlinko

One wag​ subtitled it ‘Homer in a Nutshell’. The Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, was thought by the Romans and its early English translators to be a minor work of Homer’s from the eighth or ninth century BC, though its linguistic anachronisms and allusion to Callimachus place it as a likely Hellenistic epyllion. Its three hundred lines in...

After​ reading five hundred pages of Gary Lutz, I opened Google Maps and took a long, hard look at the state where he was born: Pennsylvania, the ‘Keystone State’, although it’s shaped more like a ticket stub fished from a back pocket, is entirely recognisable in his descriptions. ‘I lived in a town that had sourceless light falling over it at all hours.’...

                                     ‘No Trespassing’, read the blackened sign, prompting a wry laugh. Scorched earth brooks no law. The blazes happened months ago in the news; now a wilderness prodigal...

Rushing​ out of the house for an appointment, I grabbed what I thought was Diane Williams’s Collected Stories. When I retrieved the book from my bag, I was surprised to find it was actually the latest volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters: they’re both large hardbacks whose pale jackets are touched with baby blue. The switcheroo generated unforeseen connections. If I had been...

Many years ago​, I had a treasured book – a history of scientific ideas – and what I liked most about it were the illustrations of various models and contraptions. Ptolemaic spheres! Arabian water clocks! Alchemical cucurbits! I tried to account for my fascination with these objects. Was it artisanal appreciation? The visual appeal of things in an age of signals and circuits?...