This post may seem like a ritual every 3 months, but that impression is only surface deep. The art featured in this new issue is anything but ritualistic. We don’t claim the high moral ground or promise “amazing” literature; instead, we simply bring what has impressed us.
So, it is pointless for me to linger in editorial meandering.
This Autumn issue opens with essays that unsettle and illuminate: Dani Otnes Aurouze considers the quiet ruptures of memory in Plight; Cécile H. Blanc invites us into the charged intimacy of The Peep Show; Jan Rylewicz turns light itself into a subject of inquiry; and Bernardo Montes de Oca writes of passing time in A Little While.
Poetry spans continents and sensibilities, from Julie Adrian and Kathie Clarke to Shivani Sivagurunathan, Arber Selmani, Blaire Baron, Ted Morrissey, Nolo Segundo, Patrick Vala-Haynes, and others—voices that remind us the lyric remains both fragile and unbreakable.
Our fiction ranges widely: Jake Kendall’s satirical The Caricaturist, Karla S. Bryant’s haunting Unsaid, Faith Miller’s American dreamscape, Abdul Elah Abdul Qader’s portraits of working lives, Vahid Zakeri’s speculative Naarmak and the Clones, Du Jie’s unsettling Guinea Pig, and more.
On the cover: Pippa Darbyshire’s Ships 13, an oil on primed board, holds the whole collection in its quiet balance between motion and stillness.
The Brussels Review remains, as ever, a gathering of distinct, sometimes unruly, sometimes tender voices—each one an act of resistance against silence.
I hope you enjoy it, feel at home within its pages, and consider becoming a subscriber.
