Eerie calm. A standing wave, a never-ending breaker on a rock cliff, a bass vibration that trembles through every cell like the mountain itself is humming, rain washes the windows like poison— Someone screaming, Fuck! Fuck! * What happens to your Feed after you die? There’s no way to survive that. No way. No, I don’t know know; I didn’t watch it with my own two eyeballs, but I know. Stop, just shut up for one second, I know. And so there’s this thing attached to me, this awful piece of knowledge like a – like a dead dog. A dead-dog piece of the story. What happens to the Feed after you die? When you die it rules out posting something like: hey I’m dead. The word sloshes around like a dog dish full of water. You might die, but your Feed lives on in a kind of afterlife. Friends...

Catherine Hearn | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Having finished their new short story collection in almost one sitting, I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Liadan Ní Chuinn about their writing. Every One Still Here (2025) published by The Stinging Fly Press in March and Granta Books in July, has already been described by Kevin Power ‘as among the best Irish books of the 21st century’. The collection is tied together by themes of grief and haunting; the ways that the past is ever-present, as the title alludes towards. These are stories of fragile, palpable lives being played out in a supposedly post-Troubles North of Ireland. In ‘We All Go’ a young medical student grieves for his father and attempts to unearth fragments of the life he lived and the violence he endured at the hands of the British state. In ‘Russia’, complex issues of...

Joanna Pidcock | Tolka, Web Only, September 2023 Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’,...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Issue Four, March 2023 In July 2022 I set up a conversation over Zoom between two authors and friends, Nicole Flattery and Colin Barrett. I sent them a list of questions, asked them to hit record and left them to it. Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic from Mullingar, County Westmeath. Her short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time, was published by the Stinging Fly Press and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, is set against the backdrop of Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1960s New York, and was published in March 2023. Colin Barrett is a writer from County Mayo. His first short-story collection, Young Skins, was published by the Stinging Fly Press in 2013 and his second collection, Homesickness, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. His debut novel will be published in late 2023. The questions I sent to Nicole and Colin...