The Bellevue Literary Review: A journal of humanity & human experience

The truth is often stranger than fiction at Bellevue Hospital, New York's medical center of first choice and last resort since the 18th century.

John Lennon's assassin Mark David Chapman was among the high-profile patients housed in its psychiatric ward. Emergency room arrivals included victims 9/11 — and an artist who lopped off two fingers when ignored by a community newspaper editor. The hospital went Hollywood in 1945 with the Oscar-winning movie "The Lost Weekend"

So it seemed only a matter of time before the storied 271-year-old facility, the nation's oldest public hospital, started producing literature — and not just the medical kind.

The Bellevue Literary Press does exactly that. Its first four titles this spring included a novel interweaving themes of sickness and recovery into a 1940s family drama; a collection of editorial cartoons by an accomplished physician-artist, and an experimental nonfiction work that explored the mind-set and meaning of awkwardness.

The press plans to release four more books, including another novel, this fall.

Related:
From the NY SUN "Literature Now Available From, Not Just About, Bellevue"
From Gothamist " Books by Bellevue "

"Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, has been witness to nearly 270 years of human drama. In this tradition we have created the Bellevue Literary Review, a forum for illuminating humanity and human experience. BLR is published by the Department of Medicine at New York University. We invite submissions of previously unpublished works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health and healing. We encourage creative interpretation of these themes." - Bellevue Literary Review