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

Business and Democracy

Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business and Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle’s Democracy is Power  

  • J. W. Mason

Allusive and Ambiguous 

Christina Hume: Musca Domestica; Tessa Rumsey: Assembling the Shepherd

  • Catherine Daly

Reading Guillevic

Carnac and Living in Poetry. 

  • James Sallis

Review: The Tablets

By Armand Schwerner. 

  • Andrew Zawacki

Prose Microreviews: October/November 2000

Mike Davis and more. 

Microreviews: October/November 2000

Thirteen new collections of poetry. 

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Two Jews, Three Immigrants

A short story.

  • Elisha Porat

The Day of Saint John

A short story. 

  • Kathleen de Azevedo

Restless Souls

The novels of Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua create their own diaspora

  • Ross Feld

The Naked and the Dead

Review: Tom Drury and Stephen Dobyns.

  • Roger Boylan

Tunnel Rats

By H. Lee Barnes and John Mort. 

  • Jerome Gold

Review: Vertigo

By W. G. Sebald. 

  • Joyce Hackett

Review: Pastoralia

By George Saunders.

  • Stewart O’Nan

Review: In My Other Life

By Joan Silber.

  • Jennifer Howard

Review: That Sweetest Wine

By Robert Cabot.

  • Bill Marx

Review: Nobrow

  • Edwin Frank

Review: Enola Gay

By Mark Levine. 

  • Stephanie Burt

Reading Rilke

Reflections on the Problems of Translation. 

  • Nicole Krauss

Review: Wrong

By Reginald Shepherd. 

  • Brian Henry

Review: Men in the Off Hours

By Anne Carson. 

  • John D’Agata

Microreviews: Summer 2000

Eight new poetry collections. 

Poet’s Sampler: Bradley Paul

Introduced by John Yau

  • Bradley Paul

Poem to Line My Casket with, Ramona

  • Joshua Bell

Poems of Depth

  • Mónica de la Torre
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