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

Taking Sci-Fi Seriously

  • Scott Sanders

Northrop Frye at Harvard

  • Luis Ellicott Yglesias

Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier

  • Gene Bell-Villada

Nabokov’s Pushkin Revisited

One cannot very well be neutral about a writer who so ostentatiously shuns neutrality himself.

  • R. W. Flint

An Interview with Grace Paley

Talking with the writer, teacher, and political activist.

  • Grace Paley
  • Gail Pool
  • Shirley Roses

Beyond Hadrian’s Memoirs

  • Alexander Coleman

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Flann a la Creme

  • Bernard Benstock

A Festschrift for “Ernst Who???”

Despite being a prolific composer, Ernst Krenek is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century.

  • Glenn Gould

The Proselytizing Chef

How Julia Child sold Americans on the difficult, alien art of French cooking.

  • Stephen Schmidt

Thomas Mann and Hesse: The Passing of Romanticism

  • Gert Bruhn

Edward Gorey’s Tantalizing Turns of the Screw

  • Selma Lanes

An Interview with Joseph Campbell

  • Joseph Campbell
  • Gerald McDermott

Fiction as Philosophy

On Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  • Thomas Farrell
  • Thomas Frentz

The Hamsun Cult

  • William Cloonan

The Fiction Collective Novels

  • Fanny Howe

This Man’s Scope and That Man’s Art

  • Jerrold Hickey

Gertrude Stein and the Rhythms of Life

  • Joel Porte

Ingmar Bergman and His Audiences

  • Carol Clover

The Importance of Being Colette

  • Frederic J. Shepler

An Interview with Susan Sontag

Geoffrey Movius speaks with Susan Sontag about photography, writing, and memory.

  • Susan Sontag
  • Geoffrey Movius

On American Food History

Julia Child reviews a gastronomic history of American cooking and details her obsession with all things corn.

  • Julia Child
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