Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe | Tolka, Issue Two, June 2022 In 2008, Marcella Beccaria, curator of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, commissioned a solo exhibition by celebrated artist Roberto Cuoghi. Šuillakku – as the show was to be titled – would represent lamentations for the fall of the ancient Assyrian city Nineveh. The pièce de résistance was a sculpture of Pazuzu, a fiendish demon of evil spirits and keeper of frigid winds which were thought to bring blight, famine and pestilence. The Met Museum’s description of Pazuzu offers: ‘He stands on two legs and has human arms ending in claws with two pairs of wings, a scorpion’s tail, a snake-headed erect penis and a horned, bearded head with bulging eyes and snarling canine mouth.’ Cuoghi’s nineteen-foot-tall Pazuzu dominated the third floor above the entrance to the castle in Turin, a towering threat keeping watch over the unwitting visitors. Cuoghi...

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...

Mícheál McCann | Tolka Issue Five, June 2024 Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979) has almost ended. Miranda and Ferdinand are in wedding garb. A band of white-suited sailors loiter gayly. The set is aristocratic and regal. The frame fills with confetti of such colour that the screen becomes momentarily blocked with a pastel pink. The confetti thins, carpeting the entire set, to reveal a figure in golds and yellow helmeted with a pearl-gold bonnet from which stem seven white-gold feathers; discs of translucent lemon fabric imitate the dawn rising behind her. This is the Goddess come to bless the wedding party, yet it is her rendition of the torch song ‘Stormy Weather’ that haunts my imagination most. The lyrics are smoky and sad; her face is lit by an eerie smile. I lie awake later that evening thinking of the lilting sailors, Welch dwarfed between them, beaming as she sings....

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...