Ange Mlinko

The Danish writer​ Olga Ravn has recently published two short novels, one set in the future and one in the past. Both concern insular societies whose members turn on one another with fatal consequences. The Employees takes place on the Six-Thousand Ship, floating through interstellar space with a crew of humans and humanoids working together on an unclarified mission for an unspecified but...

In​ 1676, during the period of colonial conflict known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept...

Do women​ hate art? ‘I’m going to focus on making art that doesn’t look like art. Art that has the feel of women talking everyday crap, like you and me here, me solving all your problems.’ This is Anti (short for Antigone) talking to the unnamed narrator of Theory and Practice, a graduate student at the University of Melbourne. It is 1986. You can still write a fan...

When​ I first read László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, published in Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation in 2013, I thought I had discovered a sutra of a cult I had been unconsciously following for most of my life, a cult I had dimly perceived through museums and libraries but that now I could see was mystically systematised. It had no name, as the white heron...

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...