The Circle

Open this book, and you will enter a world refracted in a prism with thirty-two polished surfaces. A gem, cut in the Eurocrat diamond district, emitting multifarious literature through its many faces. 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 anglophone and anglophile writers, itinerant and settled, share and sharpen their 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.