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

Ground Down to Molasses

The making of an American folk song.

  • Dave Byrne

Severance

Winner of the 2014 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest

  • Leslee Becker

The Lost Girls

Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen.

  • Alan A. Stone

Transcendentalism

  • Reuben Silberman

Nearing Sleep

  • Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Looking South to the River (II)

  • Li Hou Zhu

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Microreviews: April/May 2004

Cubicle Gothic

On writing Kings of Infinite Space

  • James Hynes

Big 32

A short piece of fiction.

  • Ander Monson

On the Narcissism of Minor Differences

  • Joel Brouwer

Poet’s Sampler: Miranda Field

  • James Longenbach

Microreview: Jamaal May, HUM

  • Joelle Biele

Forget O’Hara

Lonely Christopher’s Death and Disaster Series.

  • Felix Bernstein

Mark Ford and the Real World

Ford helps American readers take pleasure in seeing with fresh eyes a country they know too well to notice.

  • Scott Bartley

Cultural Cannibal

The journalism of Gabriel García Márquez.

  • Jessica Sequeira

Autumn Leaves

  • Jeffrey Rotter

Life Is Slightly Different Than You Think It Is

  • Arthur Vogelsang

World Cup 2014—the Green Edition

The correlation between football and environmental rankings.

If Not by Smokestack

  • Laura Eve Engel

Toxicity, Vulnerability, Intimacy

An essay and interview with CM Burroughs

  • Megan Fernandes
  • CM Burroughs

Style Over Substance

On translating Proust.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Without Time

The long-awaited Endarkenment collects poems written over a span of thirty years.

  • Samuel Amadon

Five Limericks

  • Anthony Madrid
  • Mark Fletcher
  • Adam Fitzgerald

Architecture in Extremis

Shigeru Ban receives the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Does he deserve it?

  • Stephen Phelan
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