The Circle
A Brussels Anthology
Patrick ten Brink
Andreas Bergsten
9781941861707
354 pages
Harvard Square Editions
Overview
Open this book, and you will enter a world refracted in a prism of thirty-four polished surfaces. A gem, cut in the technocratic diamond district, emitting multifarious literature through its many faces. Approaching a perfect circle with each new facet. Some reflect the wistful melancholy of the Brussels drizzle, some tear open the sky with a bolt of genius that will have you groping for your sunglasses. A brain drain of thirty-four emerging and prize-winning authors, itinerant and settled, shares and sharpens its largely expat outpourings of human love and beastly bombings, reassuring community and bewildering exile. The private explodes in public, the petty corrupts the grand, the funny elbows the dire—in the heart of the old world, lives and stories converge and drift apart. This collection portrays our troubled and exciting times through short story, poem, script and novel excerpt of both seasoned pros and promising hacks. Whether brutally marooned on the damp flatlands, or cosily embedded in red-brick ale houses, their dreams and nightmares shine from this beloved, accursed, ramshackle Europe of ours. Come inside.
Author Bio
Patrick ten Brink is a writer living in Brussels, Belgium. His short story ‘The Taken’ received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train in 2017. He also writes travel poetry. Andreas Bergsten is a Swedish psychologist who started writing seriously in English under the auspices of the Brussels Writers Circle during his four-year stay in Belgium. Last summer, he returned to Stockholm for an inverted sabbatical year of work in consulting psychology. In the autumn of 2018, he will relocate to Beijing to rewrite his debut novel, The Rift.
