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

Wednesday Nights

A memoir.

  • Vestal McIntyre

Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone

A short story.

  • Taryn Bowe

Fine By Me

Geoff Dyer’s unlikely terms of engagement.

  • James Wallenstein

Last Wishes

On Nabokov’s Novel in Fragments.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

A Brief History of Ghost Hunting

  • Joshua Marie Wilkinson

A Brief History of Spying

  • Joshua Marie Wilkinson

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One, Two, Three, and Four Rabbits

Translated from the Spanish by Ezra E. Fitz.

  • Aura Estrada
  • Ezra E. Fitz

Nebenwelt

  • Cynthia Cruz

Carnival

  • Andre Bagoo

Oneiric Theory

  • Miranda Field

Review: Self-Portrait with Crayon

By Allison Benis White.

  • Victoria Chang

Liquefaction

  • L.S. Klatt

Desperately Seeking Sam

Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death.

  • Roger Boylan

World Tumbling Into World

Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary and This Nest, Swift Passerine.

  • BK Fischer

Review: Chronic

By D.A. Powell.

  • Lindsay Turner

The Transit of the Beautiful

  • L.S. Klatt

Poet’s Sampler: Farnoosh Fathi

  • Farnoosh Fathi
  • Christine Hume

12th Annual Poetry Contest Winner

  • John Gallaher
  • Rae Armantrout

Politic

  • Nick Courtright

A Distant Pleasure

New translations of C.P. Cavafy.

  • Keith Taylor

Review: The Ghost Soldiers

By James Tate.

  • Virginia Konchan

Nocturama: Novel Excerpt

  • Christine Hume

Review: Pacific Shooter

By Susan Parr. 

  • Raymond McDaniel

Review: Sight Map

By Brian Teare.

  • Rob Schlegel
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