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

A Guidebook to The Afterlife

  • John Gallaher

Because

  • Mark Irwin

Caliban’s Orchestra

  • Joshua Corey

Closer

  • Deborah W. Pattillo

Vale

  • Deborah W. Pattillo

Love Song and Magnificat (O Short Prince)

  • Patricia Goedicke

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Credit the Director

Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier. 

  • Alan A. Stone

The Pretty Ones Have Their Uses

Co-winner of the Eighth Annual Short Story Contest

  • Girija Tropp

Genre Trouble

Why can’t critics take John Crowley seriously?

  • James Hynes

Review: Loving Graham Greene and An American Outrage

By Gloria Emerson and G. K. Wuori.

  • Jennifer Howard

Review: The Forger

By Paul Watkins.

  • John Marks

Review: The Big Hunger

By John Fante.

  • Rob Spillman

Mortally Wounded Creatures

Review: The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. 

  • Stephanie Burt

Language at the End of its Tether

Review: Waldner and Wise.

  • Cole Swensen

Vaudevillians of the Void

Review: Wenderoth and Friedlander. 

  • Max Winter

Review: Karmic Traces

By Eliot Weinberger. 

  • John Palattella

Microreviews

December 2000/January 2001

Poet’s Sampler: Kate Lilley

Introduced by John Tranter

  • Kate Lilley

Break Me to Prove I Am Unbroken

  • Sophie Cabot Black

The Deposition

  • Carl Phillips

In Memoriam Richard and Yael

  • Gilbert Sorrentino

Countdown to Pearl String of Planets

  • Tessa Rumsey

Weathers

  • Ben Doyle

Argentina

  • Laura Hartmark
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