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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
An Interview | Jonathan Garfinkel on Georgian Theater, the Duplicity of the Soviet Union, and his debut novel
“No one is who they say they are, not even myself,” reflects performance artist Tamar Tumanishvili halfway through Jonathan Garfinkel’s funny and wild debut novel, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark. Tamar is about to begin a three-day bus ride from Istanbul to Tbilisi in order to investigate the mysterious past of her mentor, academic Rachel Grabinsky, whose recent death has led Tamar to reassess both Rachel’s identity and her own.
An Interview | Mai Nardone on Thai Identity, Class, and His First Story Collection
“Only you farang are so easy to come and and leave,” yells Nam to her American husband, Rick, in “Easy,” a story that sits at the emotional and temporal core of Welcome Me to the Kingdom, Mai Nardone’s debut collection of short fiction. The reason why Nam is upset is that their family has just moved from their high-rise condo back to their old townhouse. It’s 1997 and Rick—like so many others in Thailand, foreign and local—has seen his fortunes reverse due to the Asian financial crisis. This reversal puts strain on a relationship already on shaky ground.
A Review of Rachel James’s “An Eros Encyclopedia”
Published as a part of Wendy’s Subway Passage Series in September 2022, Rachel James’s debut book of poetry strips any skepticism about the expressive limits of sex and death with dissident and magnetic indulgence in the peculiarities of desire.
An Interview | Finding a Speaking Voice: Colm Tóibín’s “Vinegar Hill”
Irish politics, gay saunas, Expressionist painting, and the influence of Ashbery, Binchy, and Bishop on Tóibín’s captivating new book from Beacon Press, Vinegar Hill.
An interview | Robert Jones Jr. on Black Love, Community, and Resistance in The Prophets
Robert Jones, Jr. is the author of The New York Times Bestselling novel, The Prophets, which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction and has been translated into nineteen languages. He was born and raised in New York City and received his BFA in creative writing […]
An Interview | Beth Morgan on Jake Gyllenhaal, Mushrooms, and the Perils of Pursuing Self-Actualization
A Touch of Jen, written by Brooklyn College MFA alum Beth Morgan, centers Alicia and Remy, two codependent Brooklynites miserable in their coupledom but bonded by a shared infatuation with the titular Jen—a breezy influencer with freckled boobs and adult braces whose appeal is equated to that of a “hot […]
An Interview | John Keene on the Power of Narrative From 1613 to Today
John Keene is a Distinguished Professor of English and African-American and African Studies at Rutgers-Newark, where he has served as the chair of the African-American and African Studies department since 2015. In his own words, he says, “I’m a writer, a translator, an artist, an editor, and a mentor.” He […]