About Mag
- We publish stories that cannot simply be read and forgotten.
Each issue is a meeting place for literature, art, and imagination. We believe that in an age of endless digital noise, the greatest luxury is to look forward to a story once again. -
About
The Belles Letters Review is an independent British literary magazine devoted exclusively to fiction.
Our first issue is planned for January 2027, with a new issue published every two months.
The Belles Letters Review was created for readers who still believe that reading can be an experience in itself — something that deserves time, attention and anticipation. We publish fiction from writers around the world, bringing together both recognised authors and writers whose names may be entirely new to our readers.
Our pages are devoted entirely to stories.
Short Stories, Silent Stories and Serialised Novels
Alongside short fiction, The Belles Letters Review is also reviving a literary tradition that once stood at the heart of magazine culture: serial publication.
Throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, readers often encountered novels not as complete books, but chapter by chapter, issue by issue. Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe all belonged, in different ways, to a literary culture in which periodicals were an important home for fiction and serial publication. Le Fanu’s novels, for example, were frequently first published in periodicals before appearing in book form, while Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym began as a serial.
Serial fiction created something that is increasingly rare in contemporary reading: anticipation.
A reader finished the latest chapter knowing that the story was not over. The next issue had not yet arrived. There was time to wonder what would happen, to discuss the characters, to imagine what might come next — and then to return when the next instalment appeared.
That tradition did not disappear everywhere.
In Japan, serial fiction has remained an important part of literary and popular publishing culture. Koji Suzuki, for example, serialised Promenade of the Gods in the Japanese literary magazine Mephisto from 1995 to 2002. The magazine has also been home to serial and other fiction by numerous Japanese writers.
The Belles Letters Review brings this experience back to the contemporary literary magazine.
Our Serialisation section is built around the pleasure of waiting for a new chapter. We want our readers to discover a writer, become absorbed in a story, finish an instalment — and then have to wait for the next issue to find out what happens.
Experience
At The Belles Letters Review, that waiting is part of the experience.
Our magazine brings together short, compelling fiction, new chapters of continuing stories, and stories from artists whom we publish. Some pieces will be complete in a single sitting; others will invite readers to return to them over several issues.
We believe a literary magazine can be more than something to scroll through and put aside. It can become part of a reader’s life.
Put your work aside for a while. Take the new issue with you into the quiet courtyard of a café in London, into the boarding lounge at Charles de Gaulle, onto an empty beach on the Washington coast, to the forty-seventh floor of a hotel in Tokyo, or into the quiet living room of your own home with a cup of tea — and give the story a few uninterrupted hours.
The Belles Letters Review.
Serious literature, cinematic obsession.