Roisin Kiberd | Tolka, Issue Two, May 2022 T+1 minute Static shots of a rocket in a Texan desert. The broadcast is live, backgrounded by the gentle hum of engines. Six bodies are huddled inside the capsule; three men, fifty-seven, fifty-three and eighteen, and an eighty-two-year-old woman. They crossed the bridge, rang a silver bell, strapped in, and endured the countdown. Now they will be blasted into the sky, so far as to glimpse a fleeting oblivion. Regret and possibility collapse as they depart the earth. The flames press down, the rocket jolts, and it feels like they’re soaring out of hell. News journalists and bystanders gather on tarmac some distance away. On YouTube, a commenter types ‘With that ship design, Bezos seems like he is trying to compensate for something.’ Everything here he has paid for; the richest man on earth and, soon, somewhere off-earth, too, on the way...

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...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, January 2024 ‘The fawn looked at me, batting four sets of lashes, giving disarming smile. Off he went, hustling around the bandstand, rattling the local blue tits to the core.’ Isabel Waidner’s latest novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023), spans prize culture, notions of social mobility, wormholes, daytime telly and, perhaps most memorably, an eight-legged Bambi. Waidner’s previously published work includes Gaudy Bauble (2017), Liberating the Canon (2018), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Sterling Karat Gold (2021), which won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. Corey Fah, like Waidner, is a writer who has won a literary prize – in Corey’s case, ‘The Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils’. But Corey Fah struggles to collect the prize, which takes the form of a UFO that hovers just out of reach.  After failing to collect the prize, Corey Fah returns home to...

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...