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...

Jennifer Walshe | Tolka, Issue Three, July 2022 Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not...

Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Five, August 2024 K. arrives at the cottage first. It is still covered in red, white and blue bunting a month after the jubilee, as are the rows of cottages and the detached houses in the village, the community centre with the yoga class, the café with decent coffee, the shop selling basics including newspapers and artisan local products, and the three pubs triangulating the square – one standard fare, one gastro, one wood-fired pizza. These amenities had been advertised in the house’s listing, which pinpointed their distance from the doorstep in fractions of a mile. The local walks in the famous landscape were also listed, including one that takes you up to a twelfth-century shrine to the Virgin Mary that had been restored and reopened to pilgrims in 1961 after centuries of ruin. This and other walks are circular or could be made that...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, April 2022 Rob Doyle’s latest book, Autobibliography (2021), originated from an Irish Times book column, where he was asked to write once a week throughout 2019 about a pre-twenty-first-century work of literature, at no more than 340 words per book. He describes it as ‘the book chat equivalent of haiku condensation’. The other half of Autobibliography is a mirror text of sorts, written during lockdown in 2020, and are reflections upon these reflections on books, spanning many different kinds of writing, including memoir, anecdotes, travelogue and other, less categorisable forms. Doyle is the author of the short-story collection This Is the Ritual (2016), as well as the novels Threshold (2020) and Here are the Young Men (2014), which has recently been made into a film. Liam Harrison (LH): What was the experience of writing the shadowy half of Autobibliography, which came after writing your...