A journal of humanity and human experience
Coming up next
Can Storytelling Prevent Gun Violence?
As featured on NPR's Morning Edition
NPR’s Neda Ulaby reported on BLR‘s 20th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri, along with author Celeste Ng. Long before Celeste Ng reached stratospheric popularity with Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, she was a an emerging author, whose story “Girls, at Play” appeared in BLR and then won a Pushcart Prize.
BLR Off the Page
DISCOVER MORE
Deven Kolluri reads “The Gun Goes Off…,” a story by Ian Baaske
I could tell from his voice / something was horribly wrong. / I’m okay he said over and over / in a tone that told me he was anything but.
It gets hold of me, I wrote less than a year after her death. Somehow it creeps up.
After my father’s disk sander had whirred to halt, he turned to me and gestured majestically. “Matthew, the work is always the best pay.”
Take this, take it with crackers or bread. Do not. Do not. Do not
chew or crush. You are pregnant, may become pregnant, or are
breast-feeding.
They say the sharks came early/
and stayed late, unwanted houseguests
“Every family has one,” my sister Joyce liked to say. “One crazy uncle or aunt they can’t hide or forget.”
The book is dazzling and groundbreaking. The author’s bright, spare prose engages us intensely with her characters and their relationships.
I am a disease. My very existence poisons my father’s life.
Praise & Recognition
“The editors have produced a journal of uncommon literary quality.”
“I subscribe and receive literally hundreds of magazines every year. Of all those magazines, none stands out more than Bellevue Literary Review.”
“These two non-fiction pieces in BLR are powerful, honest, and heartrending. They lifted me up because of the truths released onto the pages. Both deal with problems our family is suffering through, so on a personal level, the authors are helping me grapple.”
“BLR's contents are at once practically instructive, and yet intangibly inspiring and utterly gripping. I can’t imagine my work as a writer, or a doctor, without it.”
“After reading it cover to cover, I came away walloped by the breadth and depth of the pain it highlights.”
“No human thing is more universal than illness, in all its permutations, and no literary publication holds more credibility on the subject than Bellevue Literary Review.”
“A kaleidoscope of creativity. . . The selections are unsentimental and often unpredictable.”
“What is most impressive about BLR, though, is how the editors can stretch their own boundaries.”
“Ask any healthcare worker, ask any patient who has come back from illness and fear, and you will hear stories that might change your life. That's what BLR offers.”
“BLR is loyal to its theme but never constrained by it, uncovering boundless tonal and narrative possibilities as it contemplates the body as a physical entity, probes the manifestation of mental illness, or reckons with how the racialized and gendered body is perceived.”
“BLR is open to many modes and styles of work; it has no house style except humanity (though excellent editing doesn't hurt either).”