The Brussels Review

03/01/2026

Corey Mertes’s The Doctrine of Signatures unfolds in seven time-worn vignettes, tracing the shape of love as it heals, falters, and endures. Drawing inspiration from old medical beliefs and buried memory, the story reflects how we often reach for those who mirror our inner wounds—hoping they’ll help us mend. Featured in the Winter 2025 issue of The Brussels Review.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6RXM29pCTSbrcCsDcgmcNI?si=1jAh0l4fR7SLbza6BVORbw

02/01/2026

The Παλιατζήδες (“Paliatzides”) are the junk dealers in Athens. Coincidentally, if you’d searched the term online, you’d find a wide range of associations, with words, such as “beggars”, “gypsies”, “thieves.”
Most days in Mexico City, I would hear their call: a voice, monotonous and reliable, “Se compra colchones, fierro viejo, lavadoras […],” naming a laundry list of things that they were collecting. It was always the same voice again and again calling for your old furniture or your old appliances.

Shena Cavallo

Read this beautiful story about unpacking grief through a series of trips to Greece in the new TBR 2025 winter issue!

01/01/2026

Dickran returns to the war-ravaged ruins of Deir ez-Zor with one plan: to rebuild a sacred memorial with his own hands. Best Laid Plans is a story of solitary resistance, ancestral duty, and reverence in the face of annihilation. Set between genocide past and war present, it’s a quiet epic of remembrance, grief, and defiance.

Dickran risks everything to build a secret memorial in the Syrian desert, honoring the Armenian genocide amid a nation torn by civil war. “If these sands could talk – of course they can’t – but if they could… But you know, and I know, that they do speak in their own inimitable way, because...

01/01/2026

Belgium’s arts subsidies protect languages, not writers—turning cultural policy into linguistic bureaucracy. In a country where English now functions as the shared language among youth, this approach excludes writers whose truth doesn’t fit within sanctioned tongues. Real cultural vitality lies in supporting creators, not guarding symbolic turf. Dritan Kiçi fans

Belgium funds languages, not writers—protecting symbols over people in a multilingual society where English quietly leads among the young. “When subsidies are attached to language rather than to writers, the system quietly stops rewarding creation and starts rewarding compliance.”

26/12/2025

Get it now! Link in the bio.

25/12/2025

Welcome to this Winter 2025 issue, conceived in the classical sense: reflective rather than reactive, inward-looking without being insular. Across nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and visual art, the issue examines how individuals are shaped by inheritance, memory, power, and silence; and how meaning is constructed when continuity is broken, distorted, or deliberately resisted. The contributions are united not by theme alone, but by a shared attentiveness to consequence—emotional, ethical, historical, and aesthetic. What emerges is an issue concerned less with proclamation than with reckoning. It gestures toward a broader turning point we are witnessing across society: a withdrawal from constant reaction and a renewed, if uneasy, return to inward examination.

Get it now from TBR Store or Amazon, in paperback or eBook version.

Across nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and visual art, the issue examines how individuals are shaped by inheritance, memory, power, and silence; and how meaning is constructed when continuity is broken, distorted, or deliberately resisted.

23/12/2025

Still looking for a Christmas gift? We are here to help.
Heartwarming Stories & Rouge present a thoughtful last-minute gift, offering cozy stories and an authentic, heartfelt experience.

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22/12/2025

Three poems explore memory, silence, and wild landscapes - where rivers, snowfields, and swallows shape our inner and outer worlds. ''Sounds evaporate into quiet / the vibrations braiding / into the smoothed hum / we call silence.''

Read these poems on our website.
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19/12/2025

They weren’t in love, they were something rarer: two people choosing each other’s company without expectation, until the world asked for more.
In this beautiful story, Wendy Ostroff explores how deep friendship is misread as something else, turning two people who once felt like home into strangers.

Read the story on our website.
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18/12/2025

Naa Asheley Ash*tey wrote four beautiful poems for you to read, all under the theme Uncomfortable (Yet Beautiful). Read her work on our website - and above all, enjoy it.

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18/12/2025

Yet, despite the intrusion, Notes to John is a must-read for all Didion fans. It gives us an all-access glimpse into Didion the person, and all the frailties and doubts it entails.

Joan Didion’s Notes to John reveals unedited therapy letters, prompting questions about posthumous publication and the ethics of literary exposure.

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17/12/2025

I stopped standing still, staying in one place. I brought back not just the comfort of my mom, but the comfort of the motion of my childhood. Like rocking a baby to sleep with a lullaby, the comfort was in the movement.

Whale movement is a condition of their survival, rather than their comfort or their familial situation. Particularly now, whales that move are the ones that survive.

In this beautiful story, Maria draws a fascinating connection between her own life and that of a whale, exploring the question: why do we move? and much more.
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