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

An Embarrassment of Riches

Literature and the Ethics of Wealth in the Gilded Age

  • Gavin Jones

Who Are You Calling Poor?

Managing Editor Simon Waxman interviews Jina Moore about how she reports and writes about poverty.

  • Simon Waxman
  • Jina Moore

Games About Frames

Minimalists Craig Dworkin and Michael O’Brien

  • Stephanie Burt

A Love Story

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. 

  • Alan A. Stone

Syntactical Splurges

Bernadette Mayer’s The Scarlet Tanager.

  • Bryn Canner

Muslims Need Not Apply

Disband the International Commission on Religious Freedom

  • Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

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Islamophobia Is Bad for Business

Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment has cost the United States and the West a number of business opportunities.

  • Massoud Hayoun

Wake

  • Molly Minturn

The Killers

  • Andrew Elliott

Before Diagnosis

  • Roger Reeves

Whistle and Snare

  • Broc Rossell

when i go to bed i go to bed with the lights on

  • Sasha Fletcher

Hibernalphilia

  • Lisa Russ Spaar

Ice Idyll

  • Lisa Russ Spaar

Tayopa

"Here beat the true pulse of the New World. Here its promises of happiness were given the lie."

  • Ben C. Stroud

Poet’s Sampler

  • Mary Hickman

Still a Man’s World

The myth of women’s ascendance.

  • Philip N. Cohen

Forget Harry Potter

Adults Should Read Joan Aiken's Wolves

  • John Crowley

Femininjas

Women in Fiction Fight Back

  • Elizabeth Hand

Son of Madonna

Whereas Christians know Jesus as the son of God, Muslims know him simply as the son of Mary.

  • Haroon Moghul

Developing “Soft Eyes”

We must remain promiscuous with our binaries.

  • Robert Archambeau

On the Limits of Binary Thinking

Final repsonse: Why does any of this matter?

  • Marjorie Perloff

Canon-Formations

The avant-garde canon is racially homogenous.

  • Cathy Park Hong

The “I” of Lyric

The middle ground between “conservative” and “conceptual.”

  • Dan Beachy-Quick
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