The Brussels Review

20/07/2025

In Sis Byers’s Forbidden Passions, a woman’s unexpected entanglement with a box of donated romance novels becomes the fulcrum for an emotional and spiritual reckoning. Once a skeptic of love stories, Roz finds herself consumed by their forbidden intensity, compelled not by the plots but by the desire they awaken—something long dormant in her own life. As domestic chaos and invisible labor crush her spirit, she discovers fleeting rebellion behind locked bedroom doors, in the hush of stolen hours, and through a high-speed burst of freedom on small-town roads. She couldn’t remember when her blood throbbed for someone. When longing kept her up at night—if it ever kept her up at night. Quietly blistering and impeccably observed, this story navigates the inner architecture of a woman’s dissatisfaction and longing with unflinching clarity.
Art cover by Mia Feliç

A restless mother finds unexpected escape and desire in a box of romance novels, unlocking a passion she never knew she needed.

12/07/2025

Facing the legacy of empire through shared song, Facing Uncomfortable Truths While Changing the World One Song at a Time is a deeply personal, clear-eyed narrative of a choral tour that becomes something far greater: an exploration of historical complicity, cross-cultural kinship, and the moral weight of memory. As Peter Thorlichen recounts encounters with British gospel choirs, Windrush descendants, and powerful exhibitions on slavery, the music of SANS (Sharing A New Song) weaves a bridge between cultures and centuries. In the Bristol Museum, where a sign asked, “Was this building built on money from slavery?” the chorus sang: I open my mouth to the Lord / and I won’t turn back / I will go, I shall go / to see what the end is going to be. The journey—guided by their Black British host Carlton Walker—confronts injustice past and present, culminating in a rare mutual vulnerability that embodies both truth-telling and hope.

An intimate travel memoir exploring music, memory, and reckoning with colonial histories through transformative cross-cultural connections in modern England.

10/07/2025

Brettany DiMatteo’s personal essay, “The Pain of Hunger,” offers an unflinching meditation on deprivation and its enduring effects across generations. Recounting her grandfather’s childhood in an Arkansas orphanage during the Great Depression, the essay details how hunger carves itself into memory and identity, shaping not only the body but also the heart. Through the lens of family stories—of abandonment, loss, and self-sacrifice—the author probes the inheritance of pain and resilience, asking what is passed down when food and love are scarce. As DiMatteo writes, “Hunger leaves an impression on you that you can’t forget. Even when you aren’t still hungry. Even in his 80s, my grandfather wouldn’t waste any type of food. Not only would he not waste it, but he would risk getting sick over food as long as it was eaten.” This essay is a testament to the quiet heroism of survival and the imperfect love that binds generations, reminding us that every life is defined as much by what is endured as by what is cherished.

“Hunger leaves an impression on you that you can’t forget. Even when you aren’t still hungry. Even in his 80s, my grandfather wouldn’t waste any type of food. Not only would he not waste it, but he would risk getting sick over food as long as it was eaten.”

06/07/2025

A god, wry and unsparing, emerges to dispute the anatomy-obsessed heresies of Dr. Allie Sheets, exposing not only the hollow spectacle of human vanity but the very mechanism by which history itself is forged—a mechanism of longing, misrecognition, and the endlessly refracted images in the “labyrinth nest of mirrors.” In this searching, caustic monologue, by Blake Blaylock, the narrative voice drags human frailty, the hunger for meaning, and the seductions of power into a ruthless light:
“I dwell forever in the midst of a labyrinth nest of mirrors. The labyrinth spans both time and your silly politics, too, and the only way to navigate it is by interpreting through the language of the heart. I hid myself here on account of my body odor being so wretched—f**king awful, really. My hope, in the primordial eons, was that none of you would ever come looking for me. But in the hollows of your hearts must have been interpreted a need for me, for ever since the stringing of the first set of vocal cords your kind has been crying out nonstop, beseeching me in the midst of all manner of calamity, from the battlefields of mass slaughter to the slow-moving checkout lines at your local grocer. Night and day, your kind call out to me, never suspecting that I might not want to be found.” The result is a philosophical satire that interrogates the blindnesses of both faith and doubt, offering no comfort but a cold, persistent clarity.

A sardonic god refutes an optometrist’s theory of history, unraveling illusions, power, and the mirrors of the human heart with acerbic candor.

06/07/2025

"In the past few years, I’ve come to realize that letting go of my childhood concept of God does not preclude me from recognizing the inherent wonders of human existence. Nowadays, when someone asks me what I believe, this is what I say: 'I believe in Mystery.' Then I add, because they can’t see the word as I see it in my mind. 'With a capital M.'"

A reflective essay by Julie Boutwell-Peterson, tracing the evolution of personal belief—from the certainties of childhood faith through the unraveling of inherited stories, toward the quiet recognition of ambiguity and change. “A Question of Belief” explores the rituals, metaphors, and collective fictions we inherit and outgrow, and the enduring human need for meaning even as certainty recedes.

A luminous meditation on belief, memory, and loss—tracing a journey from religious certainty to the embrace of uncertainty, and the enduring need for meaning.

05/07/2025

PSA for Aspiring Writers Submitting to The Brussels Review (or, honestly, anywhere):
Our editor rejected this week 134 submissions. Some of them could have passed, but how could they?!
Tip: It’s time for a radical act: introducing yourself.
You’d be amazed how many submissions land in our inbox with zero context—no bio, no background, sometimes not even a sentence saying hello. Just a mysterious attachment and the hope we’ll somehow divine your greatness through sheer vibes.
Spoiler: We can’t.
Editors are not literary clairvoyants. If you don’t bother to tell us who you are or provide even a basic author bio, don’t be surprised when your piece doesn’t make it past the first round. This isn’t snobbery, it’s basic professionalism.
And another tip: those obscure, unknown webpage “publications” you list in your bio? They’re not helping you. In fact, sometimes they’re doing you harm. Listing half a dozen literary blogs no one’s ever heard of doesn’t make you look established—it just makes us wonder if you’re hoping we won’t check.
So, for your sake (and our sanity), please:
- Tell us who you are.
- Include a short, relevant bio (three sentences will do!).
- Maybe even say hi. We don’t bite.
Want to stand out? Be a person, not just an attachment.

01/07/2025

In a sharply rendered account of 1960s suburban life, Cynthia Bernard captures a child's moment of violent rupture—at once deeply personal and emblematic of a hidden domestic reality. Beneath the pastel wallpaper and gold-flecked banisters lies a portrait of economic strain, generational ambition, and emotional fracture. This is a story of survival told through the body and its scars.

"Amazing how much an elbow can bleed. Blood all around: on my clothes, on the varnished wood stairs... my father continues flailing, lashing, screaming at me, blinded by his tsunami of anger."

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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