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

Amor Fati

  • Sandra Lim

Recommendation: Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road

  • David Lehman

All One Has Before One

  • Simone Kearney

Objectivity

  • Tanya Larkin

Stakes Is High

  • Marcus Wicker

Store

  • Jon Woodward

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The Story of How You Went to the Museum

  • Jon Woodward

Recommendation: Erica Kaufman’s “Instant Classic”

  • Eileen Myles

from The Bridge

  • Mary Austin Speaker

Poem of Hope, Almost at Equinox

  • Brenda Hillman

Mystical Lichen Falls Through the Fonts

  • Brenda Hillman

Microreview: Elizabeth Willis, Address

Willis has the finest ear for the lyric amongst her generation.

  • Richard Deming

My Dinner with Andrew Breitbart

Breaking bread with the right’s bad boys.

  • Bill Ayers

Blaming Islam

A Boston Review Book

  • John R. Bowen

Poetry and the Public Sphere

Addressing “When That Becomes This”

  • David Micah Greenberg

Back in Time

Julian Barnes asks: How much of what we think makes us special is only a trick of memory?

  • Roger Boylan

Natural Experiments

Embracing Poetry’s Failure

  • Christopher Schmidt

Beautiful Resistance

Revolutionary theater in Palestine.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

The Gulf

In later years I will come to avoid him, but for now, I am eight years old, and the man everyone says is my father is sitting in the living room.

  • Tania James

When Critics Mattered

On Pauline Kael, Robert Ebert, and seventies film.

  • Jonathan Kirshner

Cumulus

  • Margot Schilpp

Build a Wide Tomb for War Animals

  • Patricia Lockwood

Suicide Is Painless

  • Michael Robbins

Poem for Chris Brown After His Arrest

  • Greg Weiss
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