We are bored. Bored of mainstream narratives, of ceaseless mumbling, of effortlessly click-and-publish words. Bored of opinion-sharing and provocation, of judgment without curiosity. And we are bored of the violence of the banal. But mostly, we’re bored of stories that offer nothing but the already known.
Putting together this issue, TBR Spring 2025, was an extraordinary experience. Sifting through digital files and countless stories submitted over the course of the last months—turbulent and erratic as they were by nature—invoked back a sort of color. Take this literally: picture Technicolor jumping onto a grayscale screen, bright and bold and joyful, but consequential as well. The stories we found and placed within—surprising and jarring—made us pause. Re-read. And publish.
These pieces speak of haunting ideas and unfathomable experiences. Some took us to rodeos and circuses, like As the Crowd Roars by Kevin Joseph Reigle, an electrifying dive into the grand spectacle of movement and mass exhilaration. Others insisted on the unspecial events, familiar to many, like Nadim S. Silverman’s Thursday Night Disappointment, where the right excavation of details turns the mundane into something quietly revelatory. Daily affairs are ever-present, riddled with piercing metaphors and humor—an army of robot dogs marching forward, as in J. Alan Nelson’s Human Begets Puppy, an uncanny reflection of contemporary warfare and mechanized control.
Fiction here does not settle for the expected. In K.P. Taylor’s Miss Mittens, a seemingly innocent narrative unfolds into something more ambiguous, teetering between nostalgia and unease. Timothy Riley’s A Gold Sky Arching offers a panoramic, meditative lens on the vast and the intimate. Meanwhile, SP Singh’s The Bridge does not simply connect—it questions the crossing itself. Elhassan Ait Elamal’s Ports of Pain and Mohammed Khalaf’s Better Than It Should Be bring forth narratives that carry the weight of place, movement, and the invisible burdens we inherit.
Beyond fiction, we gathered simple yet striking narratives, lifted by execution and nerve. Thomas Behan’s Plans for the Past pokes and prods at the absurdity of self-stylization, family photography, and the fragile ways in which we attempt to curate our own histories. Atieh Asadollahi’s Enchanted haunts Brussels with a specter that lingers just out of reach—part longing, part unreality. Nonfiction here does not seek to explain; it invites, it unsettles.
Poetry, too, in this issue refuses to be anything but raw. Buffy Aakaash’s Hollister Hill hums with the nocturnal breath of nature, a sensory immersion in soundscapes that exist both inside and beyond the self. Liana Kapelke-Dale’s Paris Syndrome pulses with disillusionment and awe, as expectation collides with the city’s unapologetic reality. Matthew Gulley’s Coney Island Return turns disappointment into devotion, where love reshapes the trivial. Oz Hardwick’s Leaving the Mechanical City captures a moment in motion—silent, cinematic, quietly escaping.
The pages of TBR Spring 2025 hold works that do not seek easy answers. They resist the tidy, the obvious. Now that the issue has stepped outside our hands and into the world, we find ourselves reminded of why someone needs to write. That quiet yet persistent urge, or fascination if you like, with shaping thoughts into sentences, into stories that hold more than the sum of their words. Maybe it’s about making sense of things—or refusing to accept them as they are.
But why someone picks it up, flips a page, searches for a trigger, or (why not) a dialogue with a text brought by a distant stranger into the intimacy of their own eyes—well, I’ll leave that to you.
