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

Stele for Lost Time

  • Charles Bernstein

Brave Faces

  • Kathleen McGookey

The Crime

  • Darryl Phelps

Letter to Artaud

  • Tomaž Šalamun

Shakespeare’s Tarantino Play

Titus, directed by Julie Taymor.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Cult of Authenticity

India’s cultural commissars worship “Indianness” instead of art.

  • Vikram Chandra

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Beauty and Redemption

American Beauty and Elaine Scarry look for aesthetic experience in unexpected places. 

  • Alan A. Stone

Five Ways To Propose Marriage

An instruction manual, for my only brother Sam.

  • Molly Melina Sultan

The Mysterious Romance of Murder

The enduring highbrow fascination with detective stories.

  • David Lehman

In the Machinery

By Alice Elliott Dark and Tracy Chevalier.

  • Felicia Ackerman

Golden States

Review: Lucia Berlin and Liza Wieland.

  • Susan Daitch

Embracing Defeat

How the publishing industry is failing readers—and how it could do better.

  • Neal Gabler

Review: American by Blood

By Andrew Huebner.

Review: Sick Puppy

By Carl Hiaasen.

  • James Hynes

Review: Equal Love

By Peter Ho Davies.

  • Randall Curb

Prose Microreviews: February/March 2000

From Tupperware to Stalin. 

Review: Wake

By Bin Ramke. 

  • Max Winter

Review: Swarm

By Jorie Graham. 

  • Andrew Osborn

Three New Poetry Collections

On Mark Wunderlick, Dana Levin, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

  • Reginald Shepherd

Poet’s Sampler: Loren Graham

Introduced by Susan Wheeler

  • Loren Graham

So Little Cause

  • Anna Rabinowitz

Ventriloquy

  • Andrew Zawacki

Amphitheaters

  • E. A. Hilbert

A Million Futures of Late

  • Christine Hume
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