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...

Julia Merican | Tolka, Web Only, April 2024 Amina Cain’s writing articulates seemingly small, peripheral things that nonetheless hold us in their thrall with bewitching precision: the specific sadness of candlelight dancing across a solitary dinner table; how we catalogue our encounters with books that have moved us; the pleasure of going out to buy the persimmons and the butter, of sinking into a painting after a long day of labour, of meeting a friend after a spell of loneliness. Cain is the author of the short-story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (2009) and Creature (2013), the novel Indelicacy (2020), and A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022), a series of essayistic enquiries. She spoke to me from Los Angeles in October 2023.  Julia Merican (JM): When I knew I was going to be speaking to you, I started to read the interviews you’d already had with other people....

Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...

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...