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

Inventing Irving Howe

He yearns to be a socialist leader, a man of action, but what he loves is the Talmudic solitude of the written word.

  • Michael Greenberg

Lesbian Fictions: Straight or Narrow?

Traditionally, lesbians have appeared in fiction just long enough to be saved by men, perform acts of gross depravity, or suffer at their own hands.

  • Kerry Fried

The Milkman & I

Winner of Second Annual Short Story Contest

  • Tom Paine

A Strange Hybrid

A close look at post-Soviet commercial advertising reveals that market norms never really took hold—even among capitalists.

  • Svetlana Boym

Outside the Blue Nile

  • Yusef Komunyakaa

Realization and Recognition

The art and life of John Fante.

  • Neil Gordon

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Layaway

Winner of First Annual Short Story Contest

  • Michael Dorris

New South African Poetry

  • Peter Anderson
  • Kim Cooper

Review: Carl Philips’s In the Blood

  • Stephen Tapscott

Review: Elaine Brown’s Taste of Power

  • Farah Jasmine Griffin

The Intelligent Forty-year-old’s Guide to Rap

Rap poetry is full of cutting-edge linguistic innovations.

  • Mark Zanger

Into the Electronic Millennium

The first installment of a new series, Terminal Reading.

  • Sven Birkerts

The Mapplethorpe Moment

For the photographer, art happens when the heat of living and the ice of death meet.

  • Michael Bettencourt

Making It New

For a second generation of Holocaust writers, the wounds are still open but the language is closed.

  • Jonathan Wilson

Influences

On the power of T.S. Eliot.

  • Seamus Heaney

The Month of Rushdies

  • Eliot Weinberger

Seeing Eye to Eye

An interview with Arthur Miller.

  • Arthur Miller
  • James Carroll
  • Helen Epstein

Walking the Line

Don DeLillo and the New Journalism.

  • Cecelia Tichi

Poet’s Sampler: Ha Jin

  • Ha Jin
  • Allen Grossman

Party

  • Joyce Carol Oates

Inside Book Reviewing

The moral quandaries of criticism.

  • Gail Pool

Video Novels

 TV subverts even the possibility of morality, of human responsibility.

  • Cecelia Tichi

Is There a Postmodern Music?

Serialists are consolidating one of the most radical shifts in music history.

  • Arthur Berger

Under the Gun

The thing that’s missing from American writing today.

  • Alfred Kazin
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