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

Bernhard’s Inferno

  • Lyle Rexer

The Difficulties of George Steiner

For Steiner, there is nothing worth knowing about the text that the text does not somewhere contain.

  • Mark Edmundson

Gunther Grass Floundering

Grass is haunted by the memory, meaning, and implications of World War II, and it is only through children that he can make some sense out of what happened.

  • William Cloonan

William Carlos Williams in a World of Painters

His great achievement was to bring some of the qualities of painting into poetry.

  • Bonnie Costello

The Duke and His Only Son

  • Alexander Coleman

Cocteau the Invisible

  • Shelley Temchin Henze

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Edmund Wilson’s Quarrel with Literature

  • Luis Ellicott Yglesias

Doris Lessing Out of Africa

  • Ruth Perry

Back with the Agrarians

Reassessing the movement of Southern critics.

  • Elizabeth McKinsey

Letters from Prison

On Nazim Hikmet’s poetry.

  • Ellen Ervin

Guide to the Latin American Boom

The writers engaged in a transfiguration of Latin American reality, from localism to a kind of heightened, imaginative view of what is real.

  • Alexander Coleman

Borges on the Right

To those who are familiar with his writings, Borges’s transformation into a public personality is of supreme irony.

  • Katherine Singer Kovacs

Nadia Boulanger: A Life Devoted to Music

  • Charles Fisk

The State of the Céline Industry

  • Milton Hindus

Reconsidering the Nonfiction Novel

  • J. M. Alonso

The Fictionalization of Self

On André Malraux.

  • William Cloonan

The Case of “The Unfinished Sentence”

  • Steven Kovacs

Modern Eastern European Fiction in Translation

  • Eva Hoffman

Simone de Beauvoir Now

  • Martine Astier Loutfi

Power and Limits

  • Gail Pool

Up from Underground

  • Eugene Goodheart

Beyond One Hundred Years of Solitude

  • Alexander Coleman

Recent Books on Jazz

  • Michael Ullman

New Recordings of Charlie Parker

  • Michael Ullman
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