The Brussels Review

18/01/2026

“It was just a lamp, a tree in rainfall, but we knew it was a haven lit with souls!” Jim Newcombe

14/01/2026

Is it unfair to the other authors for one of them to have 2 stories in the same TBR issue?

13/01/2026

European literature is born from enforced proximity. From the impossibility of sealing oneself off completely. From the daily friction of languages, classes, resentments, affections, histories, all occupying the same physical space.
-From the Editor-

09/01/2026

Sometimes starting a new book can be quite challenging. We are here to help. If you are looking for a good alternative, The Brussels Review offers a diverse collection of short stories, ensuring there is always something engaging to read and that boredom never sets in.

>>link in bio

09/01/2026

Her name was Annie.
She had lived for a long, long time.
A long life that was thrust onto her without much discussion. It was just assumed that she would do it, because she was part of her quiet and dignified family, because what the family had been doing was an honourable deed, a deed that would ruin the balance of good and evil, of heaven and hell if it was not done and done properly.

Read this beautiful story in the TBR winter issue!

06/01/2026

As snow falls across Europe, this poem invites you to sit by the heater and drift into nostalgia, while snowflakes give the world a soft white glow.

Read this poem and more by C. Desirée Finley in the TBR Winter Issue.
>>link in bio

04/01/2026

He was 63, about medium height for a gr**go, full head of brown hair, clean-shaven, with regular features. He was bulky but not fat, and strong. He liked to wear Randolph aviators.
He drove his rental car to Miguel’s, a mechanic he considered an innovative genius.

S. G. South was an English teacher, writer, and editor. He wrote a story about smuggling migrants across the Mexico–U.S. border.

Read this story in our new winter issue.
>>link in bio

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.