The Brussels Review

30/06/2025

Food, wine and publishing. A little party for the summer issue of The Brussels Review.

18/06/2025

In “Empty White Christmas,” Tommy Vollman distills the vacancy of loss through lucid, understated prose, as a brother traverses memory’s edge and the stark rituals of grief. Through empty seats and fading light, Vollman evokes the persistent ache of absence—what remains when nothing can be restored.

"My brother, I decided, was so awfully angry, brimmed with fuming, outrageous words that he’d sewn and strung together in long, awkward streams that slammed into my heart because he was dead and I wasn’t. I only hoped that he knew then and always that I loved him so goddamned much that I would.....

18/06/2025

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16/06/2025

Through interwoven portraits of a mother’s wisdom, a daughter’s evolving self-perception, and a grandfather’s genteel decline, this intimate memoir explores how affirmation, dignity, and memory transcend generations. The narrative shifts gracefully across cultural landscapes and time zones, tracing how women and families negotiate identity amid global and personal change.

A generational meditation on memory, identity, and affirmation through intimate portraits of self, mother, and a fading patriarch.

14/06/2025

The Summer edition of The Brussels Review presents a compelling convergence of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. Across pieces that dwell in hesitation, rupture, and existential drift, this issue invites readers to explore what remains of the human when identity, memory, and time are unsettled. An essential gathering of voices for thoughtful summer reading.

A vibrant showcase of international literature, The Brussels Review – Summer 2025 presents a sweeping collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that challenges, surprises, and endures. With contributors from five continents, this issue offers a panoramic view of contemporary literary voices, e...

09/06/2025

Set in Northern Thailand, this immersive narrative explores a young traveler’s descent into Muay Thai training, where through violence and the discipline of repetition, a bruised body and restless mind find unexpected clarity.
Micaela Edelson

A raw journey through Muay Thai, rage, and fleeting healing in Northern Thailand—where violence becomes both discipline and catharsis.

07/06/2025

Through a cascading series of lyrical inversions, Never too Late by Ramzi Rihani explores the mutable borders between sorrow and strength, fear and awakening, memory and rebirth. It is a testament to the quiet revolutions that occur within, affirming that even in stillness or despair, transformation remains possible.

When fear stretches itself and awakens our strength / When noise stretches itself, and you start listening / and the beast stretches itself to become human / It is never too late to remember, wish, and fly

06/06/2025

Ximena Maldonado Sánchez’s landscapes are not depictions but emanations—deserts that remember heat, speak in glare, and shimmer with chemical memory. Her palette burns with violets, bruised pinks, and scorched blacks, forging visions that feel less seen than absorbed.
“I do not look at her landscapes; I feel looked at by them. An eerie warning hums beneath her surfaces: stay away from the desert if you do not belong to it.” The Bernier-Eliades Gallery

The desert in Ximena Maldonado Sánchez’s paintings is not a place but a pulsing, radioactive body remembering heat, exile, and hallucination.

05/06/2025

In this sharp and uncanny parable of the afterlife by Jonathan Scott, a man’s casual dismissal of medical advice turns metaphysical when he dies of a heart attack—and wakes to a cosmic guide cloaked in familiar forms. Between salt, scripture, and flickering neon, Frankie is offered a decision: dissolve into nothing or awaken to something deeper.

“You’ve just come from hell, Frankie. Only you’re not Frankie anymore.”

03/06/2025

A quiet witness behind glass, the speaker captures a world of both tenderness and brutality. This spare and potent poem traces the sharp contrast between presence and alienation, ending in a decision that feels both inevitable and unresolved.

A quiet observer at a window reflects on the disarray, tenderness, and violence of everyday life—torn between distance and immersion.

02/06/2025

TBR Dark is an incursion into the unstable: a new anthology from The Brussels Review, edited by Femke Van Son, gathering literary fiction that slips into the speculative, uncanny, and psychologically unmoored. These stories confront the erosion of identity, memory, and moral certainty in worlds shaped by mechanized medicine, temporal collapse, and disembodied survival. Less a genre collection than a sustained atmosphere, TBR Dark unsettles rather than resolves, transforming how fiction navigates the future of consciousness.

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