Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Eimear McBride is the author of the novels A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), The Lesser Bohemians (2016), Strange Hotel (2020), and, most recently, The City Changes Its Face (2025).  The City Changes Its Face picks up the story two years after McBride’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, both set in London in the 1990s. It follows the tempestuous relationship between Eily, a young theatre student, and Stephen, an established actor. The City unspools over the course of a single, turbulent evening, while the narrative is punctuated by flashbacks to recent events. Significant interruptions from the past include a visit from Stephen’s daughter Grace (who is not much younger than Eily), and a dramatic shift as the novel’s style switches to a screenplay of sorts – Eily and Grace watch an autobiographical film Stephen has made about his life, that touches...

Mae Graber | Tolka, Issue Four, July 2023 John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and then his dog ate it. I love Of Mice and Men. It’s my favourite book, and I love that a dog ate it. I wish I had more details about the dog to tell you. He was not John Steinbeck’s famous poodle, Charley, who there is a wealth of information about. All I can find out of this book-scarfing hound is that he was a setter and his name was Toby. For me, personally, his literary contribution blows anything Charley ever did out of the water. I would bet my life that Toby was over eleven months, but under one-and-a-half years old. I can suppose this with such certainty because younger puppies are too unreliable to leave alone with manuscripts, and John Steinbeck, as an avid dog-haver his whole life, would have known this....

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...

Hilary A White | Tolka, Issue Six, April 2024 Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, Constellations, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for an emerging writer. It was part of a cultural moment in which brave and bold non-fiction written by women (see Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat) seemed woven through a period of great social change in Ireland. In May 2023, it was revealed that the award-winning writer, poet and anthologist was set to publish Hagstone, her debut novel, in spring 2024. Sinéad and I had crossed paths on the arts journalism circuit, and I had attended one of her essay-writing workshops. As a great many people will have experienced, she has been very supportive of my own tenuous beginnings in writing. We arranged a chat over Zoom about...