The Brussels Review

04/09/2026

Move through addiction, exile, loneliness, family memory, and strange absurdities. Dark, surreal, and mordantly funny.

Three poems move through addiction, exile, loneliness, family memory, and the strange absurdities that gather around pain. Dark, surreal, and mordantly funny, they return to poetry as a necessary ritual—a way of carrying what might otherwise be too heavy. ...

08/07/2026

"The other girls hated her. Called her a slut. They would gather in groups of three or four around the door of the girls’ room, whispering, and scowling when she came near. They’d heard the same rumors that the boys had. She stole—or threatened to steal—their boyfriends."
A great little story of surprising honesty.

The other girls hated her. Called her a slut. They would gather in groups of three or four around the door of the girls’ room, whispering, and scowling when she came near. They’d heard the same rumors that the boys had. She stole—or threatened to steal—their boyfriends.

25/06/2026

A holiday in the Algarve collides with a death back home. In Ewa Mazierska's "So Much Water, So Far From Home," sunbathing and funeral arrangements share the same breath — wry, unsettling, and quietly devastating. New in The Brussels Review. fans

While on a seaside holiday in Portugal with her two children, a woman navigates the death of her aunt back home, as sunbathing, café squabbles, and funeral arrangements blur into a wry meditation on mortality and family.

13/06/2026

An exile, Burcu Yasemin Şeyben, reflects on aging neighbors, a distant mother, illness, and the slow transformations hidden beneath the surface of an aging townhouse complex. Part memoir, part meditation on caregiving, loneliness, and belonging, this piece explores what happens when people, places, and relationships endure together while time quietly reshapes them from within.

An exile reflects on aging neighbors, a distant mother, illness, and the quiet erosion of time in a neglected townhouse complex.

13/06/2026

06/06/2026

We invite you to enter. We trust you will find your way out altered.
https://shop.thebrusselsreview.com/

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.