A Political and Literary Forum

Menu Search
Donate Shop Join

Arts in Society

Arts in Society brings our previously siloed poetry and fiction—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a common project. It focuses on how the arts—including the visual arts, theater, dance, and film—can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns, including racism, inequality, poverty, demagoguery, sex- and gender-based violence, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.

Arts in Society

People Who Report More Stress

Beating cancer should be the biggest challenge in his life, not trying to catch a cab in Manhattan.

Alejandro Varela

Arts in Society

Memoirs of an Imaginary Country

In a lost tale of Casanova, the citizens of a country at the center of the Earth must give up their home—and their women—to colonizers. 

Maria Dahvana Headley

Arts in Society

The Plots Against America

Alternate histories like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—newly adapted by HBO—force us to imagine a different America.

Matt Gallagher

Arts in Society

Adora

An aging AI researcher, alone with her robot companion, must make a difficult decision when the android begins to malfunction.

Sumudu Samarawickrama

Arts in Society

Communism Doesn’t Work

Stuck in an apartment with his ex-boyfriend, a man meets with the government agent who will decide whether the couple has really broken up.

Jack Gain

Arts in Society

Arts in the Time of Quarantine

A Special Project from Boston Review’s Arts in Society Program

Arts in Society

Cannibal Acts

In the aftermath of a flu pandemic that kills most of the population, a survivor, barricaded in Alaska, remembers her life while contemplating a grisly choice.

Maureen F. McHugh

Arts in Society

English as a Sexual Language

Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality.

Marta Figlerowicz

Poetry
Yet to own a woman
is not to master her.
In some men, the fact
of her terra incognita
makes them half mad.

Two poems

Heather Treseler

Arts in Society

The Pruner’s Tale

An ancient pilgrimage route inspires a project of cooperative storytelling which pairs writers with detained immigrants, such as the Mexican horticulturalist in this story.

Lytton Smith, David Herd

Arts in Society

Remy Charlip's Postmodernism for Kids

The artist exploded the idea of what a book can be. For him, it was not a thing, but an instrument—something to do something with.

Judith Levine

Poetry
“Does he know his sentence?”
“No”
“He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?”

From “The Apparatus”

Don Mee Choi

Sign Up for Our Newsletter

Vital reading on politics, literature, and more in your inbox

Love Boston Review?

Then you’ll love our new membership program! Join us to support engaged discussion on critical issues. You’ll also enjoy exclusive membership benefits.
Get Started

Copyright © 1993-2020 Boston Review and its authors.

Support Boston Review

Become a Member

Make a tax-deductible donation today

Boston Review Printing Note: For best printing results try turning on any options your web browser's print dialog makes available for printing backgrounds and background graphics.