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

Making History

  • Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Purgatorio, Canto XXIX

Translated by W. S. Merwin

  • W.S. Merwin

The Artist as Survivor

King of Masks, directed by Wu Tian Ming.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Lost World of Richard Yates

Why a great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print.

  • Stewart O’Nan

In the Shadow of Our House

A short story. 

  • Scott Blackwood

The Borrowers

Review: Pia Pera and Sena Jeter Naslund.

  • Michael Greenberg

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Contests of Will

Review: Miranda Seymour and Laura Hendrie.

  • Donna Seaman

The Human and the Monstrous

A novelist and his reviewer debate the literary representation of Hitler.

  • Melvin Jules Bukiet
  • Ron Hansen

Behind the Beat

The pages of Neurotica.

  • James Campbell

Review: Zwilling’s Dream

By Ross Feld.

  • James Hynes

Review: Fool

By Frederick G. Dillen.

  • Paul Gediman

Review: The Catastrophist

By Ronan Bennett.

  • Jennifer Howard

Review: Pierce-Arrow

By Susan Howe.

  • Brian Lennon

Review: My Way

Speeches and Poems by Charles Bernstein.

  • Geoff Ward

Review: Try

By Cole Swensen.

  • Gillian Conoley

Microreviews: October/November 1999

Eight new poetry collections. 

Poet’s Sampler: Prageeta Sharma

Introduced by Forrest Gander

  • Prageeta Sharma

Correct Mistake

  • Richard Meier

In the Country

  • Judith Taylor

Syntax

  • Reginald Shepherd

The Vermeer Lady

  • Emily Fragos

Arachne: Recent Memory

  • BK Fischer

Jaham and the Old Poet

  • Eric Ormsby

Of Isms and Prisms

  • Mac Wellman
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