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....

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...

1. It is a ‘sentimental mishmash . . . muddily photographed in flat television style.’ Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2. It ‘invites you to have some wonderful dumb, callow fun.’ Pauline Kael 3. It was made for €12 million – even at the time a relatively small budget – and released on 4 June 1982, when I was not quite a year old. 4. I don’t remember the first time I saw it, though I can guess that it was probably around 1991, when I was ten. I must have watched it at least half a dozen times a year since then. I am now forty, which means that I have seen it some 180 times. If we factor in the period in the middle of my adolescence when I watched this film once a week – every Wednesday afternoon, when school finished early – we can...

Sara Baume | Tolka Issue Six, July 2024 Mollie leaned over the kitchen sink and picked up a little glass bottle from the windowsill. She measured three drops into the plastic cap and showed me – it was viscous, dark brown – then she added a splash of water from the cold tap, and swirled, and held it out again so that I could see how the substance had turned – in a fraction of a second, in a spontaneous display of alchemy – so pale and cloudy that it resembled weak, milky tea. Then she knocked it down her throat like a shot, twisted her face in disgust and listed the names of the supplements she was taking to sustain her immune system. The sun was high above Mollie’s cabin. Light reached in the kitchen window and across the sink, fingered the rug in front of the log stove...