TBR Blanc 8/25

TBR Blanc is a boundary-defying anthology of short fiction that opens a wide, luminous space for storytelling unbound by theme or trend. The debut edition in The Brussels Review's new collection series, TBR Blanc draws its name from the French word for "white"—a term that also connotes blankness, openness, and undefined possibility. Within that conceptual void, this anthology gathers some of the most vivid, emotionally complex, and stylistically daring short stories by contemporary writers working across cultures, languages, and literary registers.

From warzones and hospitals to villages, kitchens, and dystopian interiors of the mind, these stories move through landscapes both real and imagined, offering readers a sustained engagement with the raw fabric of human experience. Kristine Durrant’s On Patrol delivers a visceral narrative of wartime caregiving, fractured love, and moral ambiguity. In Hadon Green, LB Benton confronts social exclusion with an intimate portrait of childhood cruelty and hard-earned empathy. Yuting Zhao’s The Snail Girl and Other Horror Stories overlays folkloric horror with psychological unease, while Jane Seaford’s The Millie Stories offer an unflinching glimpse into childhood trauma and premature loss of innocence.

Eolas Pellor’s The Newsie and the Orange Girl explores dignity in deprivation, while Jonathan Vidgop’s surreal and unsettling The Cook—translated by Leo Shtutin—blurs the boundaries between death, delusion, and philosophical obsession. Sophie Pell’s Paul’s Diner and Magda Philli’s Via della Fortuna are quiet meditations on memory and hidden rupture, while Joseph F. Hunter’s Cherished Hurts examines the aching persistence of past wounds masked by poise. In Impeded, George Oliver probes alienation and conformity within the closed culture of a soccer hooligan group, and Maxine Flam’s Who Am I disorients the reader with a protagonist awakening in a world of theological absurdity. The collection concludes with Jason Schaefer’s sharply ironic Stuck in a Closet with Vanna White, where generational neuroses, digital shame, and the absurdity of modern family life collide.

TBR Blanc is not a collection with a message—it is a collection with a mandate: to give writers the freedom to approach the page without prescription. Each story functions as a singular light refracted through the white field of the unknown. Here, narrative restraint births imaginative risk; constraint is not a limit, but a challenge, a call to innovate, to subvert, to reimagine. The result is a body of work that captures the full tonal range of contemporary fiction—from lyrical to brutal, philosophical to absurd, tender to caustic.

For readers seeking fiction that is emotionally resonant and stylistically diverse, TBR Blanc offers a rich, international tapestry of voices grounded not in shared subject matter, but in shared ambition. Each writer in this volume approaches form and language as tools to illuminate the overlooked corners of human consciousness. These are stories that do not shout to be heard, but echo long after the final page.

As the inaugural title in The Brussels Review’s collection series, TBR Blanc sets a powerful precedent for future volumes: that when thematic limitations are lifted, imagination sharpens, language breaks open, and fiction can flourish on its own terms.