Every story, like every life, begins with a threshold. We all enter life in the same way, but exit differently.
The thirty-one narratives gathered in this collection explore that fundamental human experience: the moment of entry and then departure. In the spaces between these two poles, existence – the collision of recognition, the choices and consequences that define us not by where we arrive or depart, but by what we become in transit and what we leave behind.
Entrance and Exits does not concern itself with beginnings and endings in the conventional sense. Rather, it is interested in passages: the thin membrane between before and after, the instant when one world collapses and another emerges.
These are stories about the weight of decisions, about how we cross boundaries both visible and invisible, and about the stubborn persistence of creating/discovering meaning in moments when meaning seems lost. They are concerned with what remains after a departure and what we carry with us after each entrance.
The authors in this collection – writers from around the world – bring diverse sensibilities to this shared preoccupation. They write in the registers of realism, speculation, myth, and everyday epiphany. Some of their stories are intimate; others sweep across larger landscapes. But all share a conviction: that the threshold itself is where literature lives most vividly, where character is forged, where the reader’s own passage through the world is illuminated by the passage of these imagined figures.
TBR exists to publish work that troubles easy categorization and refuses to be contained by convention. This collection embodies that mission. It is a space where different voices meet at the place where they are most themselves—at the moment of crossing.
We invite you to enter. We trust you will find your way out altered.
The Brussels Review, founded in Brussels and published internationally, is committed to discovering and amplifying literary voices of distinctive power. Entrance and Exits is part of TBR Blanc Series, a publication initiative focused on short fiction that engages with the complexity of contemporary life across borders and languages.
