Arts in Society

Boston Review’s Arts in Society section publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and criticism. It focuses on how the arts loosen the hold of convention, bear witness to injustice, provoke new ways of seeing the world, and speak to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our time.

Browse by Genre

Criticism, Poem, Memoir, Short Story

Browse Criticism by Topic

Fiction, Film and TV, Literature, Music, Poetry, Visual Art

The Attraction of Diminishing Returns

  • Audrey Freudenberg

Berryman’s Bones

  • Jeremy Glazier

Desperately Seeking Sex

Intimacy, directed by Patrice Chereau.

  • Alan A. Stone

Home Fires

Winner of the Ninth Annual Short Story Contest.

  • Manini Nayar

The Territory of Trauma

A novelist confronts the ethics and politics of her art.

  • Joyce Hackett

On Paula Fox

Credible contradictions.

  • Randall Curb

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Beyond Vanilla

A review of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry.

  • Stephanie Burt

Review: If in Time

Selected Poems 1975–2000 from Ann Lauterbach.

  • Thomas Fink

Review: Paradise & Method and The Language of Inquiry

Two very different strands of Language writing. 

  • Brian Kim Stefans

Microreviews: December 2001/January 2002

Ten new poetry collections.

Poet’s Sampler: Catherine Wagner

Introduced by Rae Armantrout

  • Catherine Wagner

Sound and Sentience

  • Nathaniel Mackey

From the Book of the Boot

  • Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Fortune Cookies

  • Dorothea Tanning

Of a Pressing Nature

  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Ascension Provisos 1–5

  • Andrew Zawacki

Boundary Fencing and Telstra Wire

  • Coral Hull

Head

  • Peter Sacks

Press Conference (January 9)

  • David Lehman

Absurd Humanism

Divided We Fall, directed by Jan Hřebejk and Petr Jarchovský.

  • Alan A. Stone

Uncle Jack and the Caped Crusaders

 Boston Review Short Story Contest — Highly Commended

  • Mary Hanna

Alfred Nobel and His Prizes

Does literature really need a “gold standard”?

  • James Campbell

A Distinctive Kind of Loner 

The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

  • James Sallis

Love Among the Ruins

Reviewing Robert Clark. 

  • Tom Bissell
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