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

The Good Historian

“Blind as light”—three of the right words where wrong ones…

  • Graham Foust

Untitled

here is a rock/ or a line through a name…

  • Barbara Claire Freeman

They’re There

In memory of Frank Kermode (1919–2010)

  • Frederick Seidel

Art for Politics’ Sake

Claire Bishop on Social Practice

  • Corinne Segal

Home for the Eid

Ramadan in Cairo and Istanbul

  • Ahmed Moor

The White Correspondent’s Burden

Today, the “savage nature” of Africa is still on display.

  • Jina Moore

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The Well

The well is poisoned, he says on the phone one week; then, another week, it’s drying up.

  • Amy Benson

Serbia’s Brokeback Mountain

Srđan Dragojević’s film about the aspirations of gay Serbs may finally be puncturing a culture of homophobia.

  • Paul Hockenos

Names, Trains, and Corporate Deals

Why Public Transit Shouldn’t Sell Naming Rights

  • Frank Pasquale

Stockton Goes Bust

A Municipal Bankruptcy, in Pictures

  • Susie Cagle

Forgetful Pleasures

Michel Houellebecq’s exciting tale of boredom.

  • Marta Figlerowicz

The New Religious Intolerance

An interview with Martha Nussbaum on the growing anti-Muslim agitations in Europe and the United States.

  • David V. Johnson

Men’s Tennis Is More Interesting Than Women’s

But It Doesn’t Have To Be

  • David V. Johnson

The Piano

The winning story of the  2012 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest

  • Alexandra Thom

Arcadia for the Aged

John Madden, the distinguished British director of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, tells us that his film has the structure of a Shakespearean comedy.

  • Alan A. Stone

Poet’s Sampler: Adam Fitzgerald

Adam Fitzgerald was my student at Arts High in New Jersey in 2001.

  • Adam Fitzgerald
  • Joe Weil

Poetry Changed the World

Injury and the ethics of reading.

  • Elaine Scarry

Amen

Ariana Reines’s Erotic Soul

  • BK Fischer

Microreviews: Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

In her follow-up to Orchidelirium (2004), Deborah Landau explores a new relationship between the poet and the urban night.

  • Jay Deshpande

Microreviews: Brandon Shimoda, O Bon

Brandon Shimoda’s O Bon charts the arc of abjection after the death of a grandfather.

  • Kristina Marie Darling

Microreviews: Jeffrey Skinner, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets

Jeffrey Skinner, author of five books of poems, has penned a hilarious yet moving “self-help memoir.”

  • Kelly Fordon

Microreviews: Elizabeth Willis, Address

Poems unafraid to salute our democratic ideals. 

  • Noah Eli Gordon

Microreviews: Harmony Holiday, Negro League Baseball

A personal and cultural history fit together first as hearing and then as seeing.

  • W. M. Lobko

It Is the Perpetual Today

The pool is empty; no bathers stand nearby….

  • Virginia Konchan
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