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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.
Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned but ancestors to be cared for.
“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”
I once wrote letters to a prisoner at Guantánamo. The letters always came back / opened.
Pitchfork is dead, but good reviewing doesn’t have to die with it.
The first capturing your gaze into nowhere
the other when you covered your face with your hands
so you were not anonymous, only unseen
On the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s posthumously published novel, Until August.
Bertrand Tavernier’s daring documentary about the Algerian revolution sought to break the silence in France.
An interview with poet Fady Joudah about writing his latest collection, [...], amid war in Gaza.
in 1989 you walk the main road to /
Tiananmen when the inexplicable /
hits
Why didn't I just say / people like us here / at this table / should not just talk about politics
Relying a little less on the odd language we’d been left inside / we turned back to feeling: — / more moan, more mumble.
Polish director Agnieszka Holland's new film exposes the violent contradictions at the heart of EU border policy.
How can you have thoughts without words? The man turned back to his coffee and drank. It was cold. Breakfast was done. Time to move on.
AI-generated novels are here, but they hardly spell the end of fiction.
Your lone question —
What happens when you ignore a part of someone? —
Would flood me, and in time, knock down
Every structure.
Generative AI has made it possible to create lifelike models of real people. Should we?
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Prolific poet and critic, winner of the National Book Award
Novelist, critic, and winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction
Feminist critic, essayist, and memoirist, whose many books include The End of the Novel of Love and Fierce Attachments
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A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
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For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.