The Brussels Review

28/04/2026

At a county fair, Alice turns a cruel family nickname into a private act of courage, entering a marble-mouth contest that becomes far more than a childhood game. Tender, tense, and quietly devastating, “Big Mouth” is a story about shame, endurance, and the first brave words after silence. .R.LehmanWiens

Alice enters a Nebraska fair’s marble-mouth contest and finds the courage to name what has been silently haunting her.

26/04/2026

Dana Wall’s lyrical meditation on love, memory, and parallel lives follows the ache of someone missed without ever being met, where the sound of an air-cooled engine and the gleam of a vintage Porsche become evidence of another life still echoing through this one.

“Some loves we live, and some we carry - gentle ghosts that whisper of roads not taken, teaching us that even an unlived love can fill a life with meaning.”

27/03/2026

A spring issue shaped by grief, memory, trauma, and change, this collection brings together fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that stay close to the raw nerve of human experience. Across breakups, deaths, old guilt, cultural estrangement, private reckonings, and even the mystery of altered watermelon taste, these writers trace the strange ways we endure, remember, and rejoin the world.
https://thebrusselsreview.com/admin/tbr-spring-26-grief-reminiscence-trauma-watermelons/

21/03/2026

A sharp, unsettling portrait of ambition, this story traces a woman’s rise into management—and the subtle moral compromises that follow. What begins as alienation turns into calculated control, revealing how easily empathy can give way to power in the modern workplace.

A newly promoted supervisor manipulates her team with a fabricated crisis, revealing the quiet ruthlessness behind workplace power.

21/03/2026

American expats in Florence find that distance doesn’t dissolve division, as friendships, politics, and identity collide in unexpected ways far from home.

American expats in Florence navigate friendship, politics, and belonging as tensions from home follow them abroad.

27/02/2026

Read the full poems on The Brussels Review website, alongside two other poems from Mark A Michaels collection, Memory. Link in bio!

26/02/2026

Read the full story The Seed that Cracks the Earth by Susan E Lloy on The Brussels Review website.

https://thebrusselsreview.com/susan-e-lloy/the-seed-that-cracks-the-earth/

25/02/2026

Read the full poems on The Brussels Review website, alongside two other poems from Harriet Ribot’s collection, Flowers. Link in bio!

23/02/2026

Read the preface of the collection by our fiction editor, on The Brussels Review website. Get your copy of Dark from the TBR Store or Amazon, available in paperback and eBook.

22/02/2026

From Dark to Darker.

Horror is a genre that still receives much undeserved negativity. It is, after all, a genre that displays the most variety: witches and vampires, ghouls and gremlins, killer forests and unforgiving ghosts. Whether it is a masked killer stalking in the night, a haunted house full of specters, or horr...

21/02/2026

Read the full poem on The Brussels Review website, alongside three other poems from Jim Newcombe’s collection, Consecration.