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...

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, 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...

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...