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

Le Cage au Dull

The varieties of gay fictional experience.

  • Daniel Harris

The Emperor’s New Fiction

Writers of the lost voice.

  • Rosellen Brown

Candidates for Survival

A Talk with Harold Bloom

  • Harold Bloom
  • Ellen Spirer

Trial by Jury

The world of piano competition.

  • Michael Kimmelman

Heaney Agonistes

In Station Island, Seamus Heaney continues his personal struggle with the meaning of the Irish past and the relation of poetry to poitics.

  • Shaun O’Connell

An Interview with Margarethe Von Trotta

“I can’t say that I’m really hating men, but things come out unconsciously.”

  • Margarethe Von Trotta
  • Gerald Peary

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The Eye of the Outsider

On the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.

  • Adrienne Rich

Play Ball

Art is where you find it.

  • Tom Hart

Journey to Macondo in Search of García Márquez

An interview with the Colombian novelist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  • Gene Bell-Villada
  • Gabriel García Márquez

Palestinian Writers in Israel

An interview with Samih al-Qasim and Emile Habibi.

  • Samih al-Qasim
  • Emile Habibi
  • Roger Hardy

Bellow’s Blues

  • William Chace

Images of Apocalypse

The artwork of nuclear survivors.

  • Estelle Jussim

Philosophers on Photography

  • Pepe Karmel

An Interview with Eugene Richards

  • Eugene Richards
  • Maren Stange

Two Tales of the City

Anti-urbanism in American literature.

  • Leo Marx

Miles Davis in Retrospect

  • Michael Ullman

Poet to Poet

A conversation with Mark Strand.

  • Mark Strand
  • Richard Tillinghast

I. A. Richards at Harvard

The most extraordinary teacher of poetry I ever encountered.

  • Helen Vendler

Revealing Gestures

Interviewing documentarian Frederick Wiseman.

  • Frederick Wiseman
  • Alan Stern

The Ethnocentric Icon

Can photographers, unlike writers, leave their native land with impunity?

  • Estelle Jussim

The Marxist Poets of Beacon Hill

  • Alan Wald

Returning to the Heartland

On the poetry of James Wright.

  • Bonnie Costello

Lillian Hellman’s Uncertainties

  • Pam Bromberg

Poetry and Power

On Seamus Heaney.

  • Shaun O’Connell
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