The first hour driving north they listened to a best of REM compilation CD and traded few words. The freeway became a single carriageway and the suburbs turned to new builds spread further apart and without trees. The houses were the same shape and had roofs the same colour. Soon […]
A Good Impression | Daniel Barrios
One That winter, when I finished grad school and had no money at all, I took a job as a packer at a dental lab. I was young and married and had two babies to support. I was not desperate, I just needed money. I had student loans haunting me […]
The 2023 Brooklyn Review Short Story Prize Winners: This Time It’s Personal
This year’s Brooklyn Review editorial team is thrilled to announce the winner’s the 2023 Short Story Contest: This Time It’s Personal, judged by novelist Ernesto Mestre. We were truly inspired by the amount and quality of submissions we received — big congratulations to this year’s winners! Stay tuned for the […]
Heartwood | Torsa Ghosal
Before living inside a giant sequoia tree, Bhumi used to live in a townhouse in Fremont, first with a professor of poetry, and later, with a data engineer. Although she didn’t come from money, she made decent wage working as a programmer at a social media company and could afford […]
My Generation | Eugene Stein
My husband and I met the old fashioned way, at a gay bar in West Hollywood, in the days before Grindr. Carlos is from Uruguay, and to him, a semi-employed Jewish writer from Jericho, Long Island was exotic. I liked his vaguely Italian accent when he spoke Spanish, and he […]
Interview | Marie-Helene Bertino on Humor, Grief, and the Humanity of Extraterrestrials
A girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. This is how Marie-Helene Bertino explains the focus of her new novel, Beautyland, which came out last week with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Like all of Bertino’s writing, Beautyland teeters on the knife’s edge of fantasy. The book follows an alien’s […]
Beer Glass | Joshua Ambre
Cynthia was waiting for him at the baggage claim, carousel five, which as always made Jared think of painted horses. Walking toward her, he felt like he was riding one. There was a candy-striped pole running down through his middle, through his stomach, rising with excitement then falling with dread. […]
The Pocket Book | Natalie Southworth
The year I started junior high, I played ringette on Wednesday nights. One of those nights my father told me we had a stop to make before going home. He said he was painting the guest room of Madame Lavoie, a friend of one of my father’s colleagues at the […]
Rituals | Martha Schabas
Nothing like sadness or anger set in right away when M sat me down one afternoon last February and told me he was moving out of our apartment. The conversation we had after felt relaxed and almost warm—it seemed perfectly normal when he paused after twenty minutes or so and […]
An Interview | Diana Reid on Relationships, Morality, and How to Write a Contemporary Novel
Diana Reid dared herself to write a novel. She loved reading, so why not try? If she couldn’t write one during the pandemic, then she figured she probably never would. Unlike most of us who resolved to finish In Search of Lost Time or master the sourdough starter, Diana was […]
“I was still just some guy at a party:” Andrew Martin on Success, First Novels, and the Role of Revisions
There’s a moment in the short story “No Cops” where the heroine of the story Leslie is hanging with her closest friend as she closes up a patron-less bookstore in Missoula, Montana. Leslie holds a “waifish” book of contemporary poetry as she spaces out and contemplates the merits of intention […]
KAYFABE | Tom Quach
He dubbed himself the “Lady-Killer,” stitched across the butt of his white tights in red cursive letters. On his crotch, a faded broken red heart split into two. That was his gimmick—the pretty boy who’d check himself out with a compact mirror as he strutted down the metal ramp. There […]
Four Photographs | Nam Hoang Tran
Nam Hoang Tran is a writer and visual artist based in Orlando, FL. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Posit, Tilted House, Word For/Word, BlazeVOX, New Delta Review, Diode, and elsewhere. More at www.namhtran.com
Blistering | Alasdair Rees
Tyson’s thigh is touching my thigh. Where our legs meet on the bench, the radiant heat from his body moves through the fabric of his pants and the fabric of my pants. It’s a strange communication, I think, taking the last gulp of my mason jar of sparkling rosé. Condensation has gathered on the bottom of the jar, and I cannot help but hold the jar in the final position of my gulp, focusing and unfocusing my eyes; seeing through the bottom of the jar, letting the dew obscure the image; watching the strange blobby shape of Evelyn’s flower, watching it dissolve into an even blobbier smear.
Awash in Elsewhere, Twisted Anew: A Review of Jennifer Soong’s Suede Mantis / Soft Rage
There is a lyrical lilt to Jennifer Soong’s recent book, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit), one could find familiar, yet it meanders from kept usual quarters, the work converses with the breeze, its specificity disarming. Soong’s poems shift us here, there, then back—changed, “moving the meaning again and again away from us.” Her collection in three tempos carries the reader across the span of many-faced moons. Her words reverberate and emit a crosswind memory of what once was, woven with breath, with silence, with tumbled currents “crashing on an adjacent rock.”
Twelve Signs Your 1918 Pandemic Affair Was Better Than a European Getaway | Jean Marc Ah-Sen
The typo on the personalized locket procured on a holiday destination acquires a forced whimsicality that must be recited ad nauseam at parties, which could have otherwise been exchanged for the discreet charm of store credit.
In Between Two Voids | Nahid Keshavarz, translated by Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
Darya is uncomfortable. Controlling the group doesn’t seem to be easy. She keeps thinking of Reza Sa’adat, and their last phone call where he said fear of death is perpetually with us, that sometimes we acknowledge it consciously and other times, hide it until it manifests in other things. The fear of loneliness and fear of death are similar. Perhaps if we can overcome the fear of solitude, we can overcome the fear of death as well.
excerpt from Silver Repetition | Lily Wang
To remember is to deny memory — to remember is to reimagine, restructure, recombine. Only through memory’s silver window can my cousin reappear. The soft, round nose, the open shell of her ear, a droplet of sweat on her temple, the skin there a little shiny, a little pink, never anything but enchanting. My hand is small in hers; in the pale grass, she harvests a fistful of black hair from the field and wraps it around her wrist like a circle of leeches.
Business | Theadora Walsh
Theadora Walsh is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her digital poetry has been shown at The Glucksman, the Granoff Center, and Pratt University and published by Oral.Pub, Inpatient Press, and Unbag. Her essays and art criticism can be found in Art in America, Artforum, Variable West, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast Magazine and elsewhere. Currently, in collaboration with Gabriel Garza, she runs a curatorial project called In Concert.
Ars Poetica | Mia X. Perez
Mia X. Perez is a PhD student of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Closed Eye Open, Inverted Syntax, Raw Art Review, AGON Journal, and more.