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

Dorothea Tanning’s “Cousins”

  • Richard Howard

St. Ursula’s Origin

  • Barbara Claire Freeman

January 1

  • David Lehman

Getting Off Work

  • Franz Wright

Governing Passion

The Governess, directed by Sandra Goldbacher.

  • Alan A. Stone

Unpracticed Fingers Bungle Sadly Over Tiny Feathered Bodies

Winner of Fifth Annual Short Story Contest

  • Kris Saknussemm

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The Orphan

A short story. 

  • Maxine Rodburg

Review: Mann and Kafka

Doctor Faustus and The Castle.

  • Steve Dowden

Microreviews

October/November 1998

Review: Life and Death

By Robert Creeley.

  • Forrest Gander

Review: Poems for the Millennium

From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude.

  • John Palattella

Review: Last Chance for Tarzan to Holler

By Thylias Moss.

  • Joel Brouwer

Review: For a Modest God

New and Selected Poems from Eric Ormsby.

  • David Yezzi

Microreviews: October/November 1998

Eight new poetry collections. 

First Annual Poetry Contest Winner: Daniel Bosch

Selected and introduced by Jane Miller

  • Daniel Bosch

Poet’s Sampler: Lee Ann Brown

Introduced by Elaine Equi

  • Lee Ann Brown

Housefire

  • Miranda Field

Autumn Song

  • Charles Baudelaire

The Farmers of Good Dirt

  • Mary Crockett Hill

From a Vacant House

  • Mark Wunderlich

Selling (Out) Nabokov

Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne.

  • Alan A. Stone

Very, Very Red

A short story. 

  • Diane Williams

Strip

Runner-up in the Fifth Annual Short Story Contest

  • Marianne Taylor

The Pilot

Runner-up in the Fifth Annual Short Story Contest

  • Wade S. Echer
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