The Brussels Review Gold Star Program Gold Star

This is not a standard submission. You pay for a written editorial reading of your work; held to the same standard we apply to everything we publish.

You receive one of two responses:

• A review and a decline: what works, what fails, and why, down to the lines, scenes or devices your piece doesn't need.
• A review and an invitation to revise: specific advice, and one chance to apply it and be reconsidered for publication.

We invite revision only for pieces we believe can be brought up to publication standard. The fee pays for the reading and the review, not for a place in the TBR. It is the same whatever the outcome, and a revised piece is judged on merit alone. Following the advice does not guarantee acceptance.

What you can send

One genre per reading: 3 to 7 poems, or up to 7,000 words of fiction or nonfiction (one piece, or up to three shorter ones).

Revision

One round. Resubmit within 60 days through the link in your response, at no further cost.

Response time

Within 3 weeks.

Format

The same rules as our standard calls: contact details and a short bio at the top of the document, under your real name; plain formatting; English throughout; doc, docx, txt or rtf, with no PDF. A submission that breaks these rules is returned for correction and may be resubmitted once, without a further fee.

Check your formatting here: Manuscript Checker

Submit

The Brussels Review invites artists to submit work for its Visual Arts showcase: painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, mixed media. Medium is not a category here. We care what the work does, not what it is made of. The work must exist as a physical object. Digital work is considered only when it has a physical element: printed, projected into a space, or built into an installation. Purely screen-based or generated images are not accepted.

What we look for

Work with a reason to exist. Ambiguity over sentimentality, sharpness over indulgence, restraint over noise. Technical skill without vision does not interest us, and neither does novelty for its own sake. We want work that holds attention, resists an easy reading, and stays with the viewer after they look away.

Decoration, illustration of an idea, purely digital images, and work that needs its statement to be understood are not for us.

How to submit

• Images: at least 5 works, one image per work, plus a detail or installation view only where the work needs it. Photograph the work, not the room: sharp, evenly lit, true colour. No filters, frames, watermarks or mock-ups. JPG or PNG.
• For each work: title, year, medium, dimensions.
• Bio: in the third person, under your real name. Tell us where you live and work, what you do besides art, and one small fact about your life. No lists of exhibitions, prizes or influences, and no self-awarded titles. Your influences will show in the work.

We don't ask for social media links or follower counts. The work is the audition.

Artists at every stage are welcome. Career stage decides nothing.

Submit

We publish reviews of new books and new art: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, exhibitions. New means published or exhibited within the last two years. A new translation of an older work counts as a new book, and translated work is especially welcome.

What we look for

A reading, not a verdict. Tell us what the work achieves and where it fails, and show it from the work itself: quote the book, describe the piece closely. Praise without reservation reads like a blurb; demolition for sport reads like a performance. We publish neither.

Know what you are writing about. Place the work in its tradition, in the author's or artist's earlier work, and in its translation where there is one. That knowledge should be visible in the review, not claimed in your bio.

Plot summary is not a review.

A new view on an older work is an essay, not a review. Send it to Nonfiction.

Check your formatting here: Manuscript Checker

Requirements

• Length: around 2,000 words.
• Link: the publisher's page for the book, or the gallery's or museum's page for the exhibition.
• Connections: tell us if you know the author, artist, publisher or gallery.
• Header: your contact details and a short bio at the top of the document, under your real name.
• Format: doc, docx, txt or rtf. PDF files are not accepted.
• Originality: unpublished anywhere, including your own blog or social media.

Check your formatting here: Manuscript Checker

Submit

What we look for

Stories rarely fail because they are badly written. They fail because they are not new. Send us a story only you could have written: not the subject, but the angle, the treatment, the voice. Surprise us through how you tell it, not through what happens.

Genre means nothing to us. A love story set in space is a love story. A ghost is a device, not a category.

Keep your characters in the story, not at the centre of every sentence. Let the energy live in what happens.

If you write in the first person, your narrator must confess, not testify. A narrator who only watches the hero and reports on him is not needed.

Don't explain, and don't end on a moral.

Length

One story of up to 7,000 words, or up to three short stories totalling no more than 7,000 words. Stories under 3,000 words are considered for web publication only.

Format

• All stories in a single document, each clearly titled.
• Your contact details and a short bio at the top, under your real name. Tell us where you live, what you do, and one small fact about your life. No list of publications.
• Plain formatting: no decorative fonts, colour or images.
• English throughout. Beyond a single word or phrase, untranslated passages are not accepted.
• doc, docx, txt or rtf. PDF files are not accepted.

Translations

Include the names and contact details of both the original author and the translator.

Originality

Unpublished anywhere, including personal blogs, websites and social media.

Simultaneous submissions

Welcome. Tell us at once if the work is accepted elsewhere.

Response schedule

Decisions go out in the first week of June and December.

Submit

What we look for

An essay asks a question, offers a hypothesis, or hazards an answer. It begins in doubt, shows its thinking, and is willing to undo its own argument. We don't want assertions dressed as insight, or a search summary with footnotes.

Memoir is welcome when you are a witness: when the subject is an era, a place, or other people, and you are the lens they are seen through. When the subject is you, the piece must confess, not testify. Grievance and self-portrait are not enough. A narrator who only watches someone remarkable and reports on them is not needed.

We are not looking for reportage, travel epiphanies, or real essays about trivial things.

A new view on an older book or work of art belongs here, not in Reviews.

Our test is simple: is our view of the world changed after reading your piece?

Length

One piece of up to 7,000 words, or up to three pieces totalling no more than 7,000 words.

Format

• All pieces in a single document, each clearly titled.
• Your contact details and a short bio at the top, under your real name. Tell us where you live, what you do, and one small fact about your life. No list of publications.
• Plain formatting: no decorative fonts, colour or images.
• English throughout. Beyond a single word or phrase, untranslated passages are not accepted.
• doc, docx, txt or rtf. PDF files are not accepted.

Translations

Include the names and contact details of both the original author and the translator.

Originality

Unpublished anywhere, including personal blogs, websites and social media.

Simultaneous submissions

Welcome. Tell us at once if the work is accepted elsewhere.

Response schedule

Decisions go out in the first week of June and the first week of December.

Submit

We publish photography as art, not documentation. Subject is not a category here: a street, a face, a body or a field is only where the photograph starts. We care what the image sees that we would not.

What we look for

Ambiguity over sentimentality, sharpness over indulgence, restraint over noise. An image with a point of view, not only a subject. Technical skill without vision does not interest us.

The pleasant, the picturesque and the postcard are not for us: sunsets, pets, landscapes as scenery. Nature photography only if it shows something we have not already seen. Nudes are welcome, without pornography and without prudishness.

How to submit

• Images: at least 5 photographs. JPG or PNG. No watermarks, borders or frames.
• For each image: title, year, place.
• Your own work: AI-generated or composited images are not accepted. Editing is fine; fabrication is not.
• People: identifiable people must have consented to the photograph. For nudes, every model must be an adult, and a signed release is required.
• Bio: in the third person, under your real name. Tell us where you live and work, what you do besides photography, and one small fact about your life. No lists of exhibitions, prizes or influences, and no self-awarded titles.

We don't ask for social media links or follower counts. The work is the audition.

Photographers at every stage are welcome. Career stage decides nothing.

Submit

What we look for

Poems with friction: work that resists, that drags something sharp across the mind and stays. Not the polite poem, not the well-made poem with no pulse. We want the subjects people lower their voices for, handled with craft, not slogans.

Clarity over cleverness. Give us images we can see, touch, smell. If a poem needs a seminar to decode, it is not for us.

If you write about yourself, the self must not be the point. We publish poetry, not diary entries.

Endings that fracture, not endings that tie a bow. No morals, no conclusions, no abstraction named in the last line.

Form must come from necessity. Break a line because the line demands it, not because you were taught to. If a poem rhymes, it rhymes throughout. Prose poems are welcome: a poetic text is poetry at any length.

A poem must stand on its own spine. Homage, "after" and "inspired by" poems, and name-dropping don't help. We read every poem as if its dedication and epigraph were not there.

Length

3 to 7 poems, or a single long poem or sequence. We read more than we count.

Format

• All poems in a single document, each clearly titled.
• Your contact details and a short bio at the top, under your real name. Tell us where you live, what you do, and one small fact about your life. No list of publications or influences.
• Plain formatting: no decorative fonts, colour or images, and no layout doing the work of the poem.
• English throughout. Beyond a single word or phrase, untranslated passages are not accepted.
• doc, docx, txt or rtf. PDF files are not accepted.

Translations

Include the names and contact details of both the original author and the translator.

Originality

Unpublished anywhere, including personal blogs, websites and social media.

Simultaneous submissions

Welcome. Tell us at once if the work is accepted elsewhere.

Response schedule

Decisions go out in the first week of June and December.

Submit