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

No Letting Go

Bob Hicok's Words for Empty and Words for Full.
 

  • Keith Taylor

The Fold

  • Jose Perez Beduya

Off Minor

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original restores the pianist and composer to the history he lived through.

  • Scott Saul

Review: The Mansion of Happiness

By Robin Ekiss.

  • Elisabeth Divis

The Rebel

Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love

  • Alan A. Stone

Conquest

  • Adam L. Dressler

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Poet’s Sampler: Sarah V. Schweig

  • Sarah V. Schweig
  • Mark Strand

The Nerve Fibers

  • Mary Jo Bang

Zigzag Ice Dragon

A hike in Tibet

  • Matthew Fishbane

Review: Bluets

By Maggie Nelson.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Degrees of Sight

Rain: Poems by Don Paterson

  • Dai George

The Ancient Dream

The tumultuous marriage of Leo and Sophia Tolstoy

  • Vivian Gornick

Virgil’s Cow

By Frederick Farryl Goodwin.

  • Samuel Amadon

Mouse in a Government Building

  • Shelley Roche-Jacques

If a Train

  • Jason Labbe

Always a Fragment. Telephony

  • Miłosz Biedrzycki

Clear and Hold

The Return of the Urban Dreamscape—in Brooklyn

  • Casey Walker

How Do I Explain?

The winner of Boston Review’s seventeenth annual short story contest

  • Adam Sturtevant

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

A short story from one of America’s most celebrated, and controversial, fiction writers.

  • Samuel R. Delany

The Gentleman Thief

A short story by the 2009 Bita Prize winner.

  • Goli Taraghi

Between Two Worlds

Goli Taraghi accepts the Bita Prize.

  • Goli Taraghi

Curtain Call

Marco Bellocchio’s "Vincere"

  • Alan A. Stone

Poetry Hot and Cold

Reviewing Leland Hickman and Myung Mi Kim.

  • Calvin Bedient

Before History

Harry Clifton's Secular Eden.

  • Alissa Valles
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