Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books alongside
MIT PressThe MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
.
The editors are Deborah Chasman and philosopher
Joshua CohenJoshua Cohen is an American philosopher specializing in political philosophy. He is Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and professor of political science, philosophy, and law at Stanford University. At Stanford, Cohen is also program leader for the Program on Global Justice at the...
;
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
-winning writer
Junot DiazJunot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience...
is the fiction editor.
The magazine is published by Boston Critic, Inc., a nonprofit organization. It has received praise from notable intellectuals like
John RawlsJohn Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and...
.
History
Boston Review was founded as New Boston Review in 1975. A quarterly devoted to literature and the arts, the magazine was started by a group that included Juan Alonso,
Richard BurginFor the Polish-American violinist,, see Richard BurginRichard Burgin is an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He has published fourteen books, with one more forthcoming, and since 1996 has been professor of Communication and English at St. Louis University...
, and
Anita SilveyAnita Silvey is a well-known editor and literary critic in the genre of children’s literature. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Silvey has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book Magazine and as vice-president at Houghton Mifflin where she oversaw children’s and young adult book publishing...
. In 1976, after the departure of some of the founding editors, the publication was co-edited by Juan Alonso and Gail Pool, and then by Gail Pool and Lorna Condon. In the late seventies, it switched from quarterly to bimonthly publication. In 1980, Arthur Rosenthal became publisher of the magazine, which was re-named Boston Review and edited by Nick Bromell. Succeeding editors were Mark Silk and then Margaret Ann Roth, who remained until 1991.
During the eighties, the focus of the magazine broadened and during the nineties became more politically oriented, while maintaining a strong profile in both fiction and poetry.
Joshua CohenJoshua Cohen is an American philosopher specializing in political philosophy. He is Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and professor of political science, philosophy, and law at Stanford University. At Stanford, Cohen is also program leader for the Program on Global Justice at the...
replaced Roth in 1991, and has been editor since then. The full text Boston Review has been available online since 1995. Since 1996, twenty-six books have been published based on articles and forums that originally appeared in the Boston Review. Since 2006,
MIT PressThe MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
has been publishing a "Boston Review Books" series.
Deborah Chasman joined the magazine as co-editor in 2001. Pulitzer-prize winner
Junot DiazJunot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience...
is the current fiction editor;
Timothy DonnellyTimothy Donnelly is an American poet. He earned his BA from The Johns Hopkins University and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University's MFA Program for Poets & Writers...
and Benjamin Paloff are the poetry editors; and Neil Gordon is the literary editor. Simon Waxman is the managing editor and art director.
In 2010, Boston Review switched from black and white tabloid to glossy, all-color format. The same year, it was the recipient of
Utne ReaderUtne Reader is an American bimonthly magazine. The magazine collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music and DVDs...
magazine's Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing.
New Democracy Forum
The New Democracy Forum is a special feature of the Boston Review. It offers an arena for fostering and exploring issues regarding politics and policy. A typical forum includes a lead article by an expert and contributions from other respondents. Past forums have covered topics such as making foreign aid work, a strategy to disengage from Iraq, and new economic stress in the middle class.
New Fiction Forum
The New Fiction Forum was created as "a space for wide-ranging dialogue about contemporary fiction, a dialogue founded on a simple premise: that despite the intense commercialism of current publishing, there are original, vital novels published every season and readers to whom such narratives are of the profoundest importance". Past forums include fiction and reviews by
Jhumpa LahiriJhumpa Lahiri is a Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both...
and
Emily BartonEmily Barton is an American novelist, critic, and academic. She is the author of two novels: The Testament of Yves Gundron and Brookland .-Background and education:...
.
Fiction and poetry contests
The publication sponsors well-regarded annual contests in both fiction and poetry. Past winners of the fiction contest include
Michael DorrisMichael Anthony Dorris was a prominent American novelist and scholar. During his career he presented himself as Native American and this identity was a key part of his professional activities and his public reputation; but its factuality is in doubt...
, Tom Paine, and
Jacob M. AppelJacob M. Appel is an American author, bioethicist and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics and euthanasia....
.
Notable contributors
- Bruce Ackerman
Bruce Arnold Ackerman is an American constitutional law scholar. He is a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School and one of the most frequently cited legal academics in the United States....
, professor of law
- Sadik Al-Azm
Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm is a Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy at the University of Damascus in Syria. He has been a visiting professor in the department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University until 2007...
, philosopher
- John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, poet
- Mary Jo Bang
-Life:She grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University, in Sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London, and from Columbia University, with an M.F.A. She teaches at Washington University in St...
, poet
- Dan Beachy-Quick
Dan Beachy-Quick is an American poet, writer, and critic. He is the author of four collections of poems, most recently, Circle's Apprentice , and A Whaler’s Dictionary , a collection of essays about Moby Dick. His honors include a Lannan Foundation Residency.His poems have appeared widely in...
, poet
- Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
, novelist
- Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, and director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and a well-known contemporary philosopher. She is the author of several books, most notably about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and...
, philosopher and political scientist
- John Berger
John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
, artist, writer, and critic
- Jagdish Bhagwati
Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati is an Indian-American economist and professor of economics and law at Columbia University. He is well known for his research in international trade and for his advocacy of free trade....
, economist
- Joseph Biden, U.S. Vice President
- Hans Blix
is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs . Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March 2000 to June 2003, when he was succeeded by Dimitris Perrikos...
, diplomat, UN weapons inspector
- Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
, literary scholar
- Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
, Chilean novelist and poet
- Roger Boylan
Roger Boylan is an American writer who was raised in Ireland, France, and Switzerland. Boylan attended the University of Ulster and the University of Edinburgh. His novel Killoyle was published in 1997 by Dalkey Archive Press. In 2003, a sequel, The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, was published by...
, novelist and critic
- Lucie Brock-Broido
Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of three collections of poetry. She has received many honors, including the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J...
, poet
- Stephen Burt
Stephen Burt is a literary critic, poet, and a professor who teaches at Harvard University.-Elliptical Poetry:Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book, Smokes, in Boston Review magazine...
, literary scholar
- Rafael Campo
Rafael Campo Pomar was President of El Salvador 12 February 1856 - 1 February 1858. Campo was elected president on 30 January 1856. He turned over power to his vice president, Francisco Dueñas, on 12 May of the same year, but resumed the presidency on 19 July...
, poet, doctor and writer
- Aimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".-Student, educator, and poet:...
, poet and politician
- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, linguist and political activist
- Juan Cole
John Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole is an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on...
, historian
- Paul Collier
Paul Collier, CBE is a Professor of Economics, Director for the Centre for the Study of African Economies at The University of Oxford and Fellow of St Antony's College. From 1998 – 2003 he was the director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank.-Life:Collier is a specialist in...
, economist
- Colin Dayan
Colin Dayan, , is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches American Studies, comparative literature, and the religious and legal history of the Americas...
, professor of American studies
- Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and author. From 1993-1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now popularly known as "U.S. Poet Laureate"...
, Poet Laureate of the United States
- Khaled Abou El Fadl, professor of law
- Owen Fiss, professor of law
- Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
, photographer and filmmaker
- John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith , OC was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism...
, economist
- Akbar Ganji
Akbar Ganji is an Iranian journalist and writer. He has been described as "Iran’s preeminent political dissident", and a "wildly popular pro-democracy journalist" who has crossed press censorship "red lines" regularly...
, journalist
- Michael Gecan
Michael Gecan is a community organizer in New York affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation. He was trained in part by Saul Alinsky. He is lead organizer for East Brooklyn Congregations and other New York based organizations. He is the executive director of United Power for Action and...
, political activist
- Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick is an American critic, essayist, and memoirist. For many years she wrote for the Village Voice. She currently teaches writing at The New School. For the 2007-2008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University...
, essayist and critic
- Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham is an American poet. The U.S. Poetry Foundation suggests "She is perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation". She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position...
, poet
- Lani Guinier
Lani Guinier is an American lawyer, scholar and civil rights activist. The first African-American woman tenured professor at Harvard Law School, Guinier's work includes professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in...
, professor of law
- Donald Hall
Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2006.-Personal life:...
, Poet Laureate of the United States
- Elias Khoury, Lebanese novelist and journalist
- Paul Krugman
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times...
, economist
- Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both...
, novelist
- Glenn Loury
Glenn Cartman Loury is an American academic and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University.- Early years :...
, economist
- Heather McHugh
-Life:Heather McHugh, a poet, translator, and educator, was born in San Diego, California, to Canadian parents, John Laurence, a marine biologist, and Eileen Francesca . They raised McHugh in Gloucester Point, Virginia. There, her father directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River...
, poet
- Honor Moore
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays.She is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir; two works of nonfiction, The White Blackbird and The Bishop's Daughter; and the play Mourning Pictures, which was produced on Broadway and...
, poet
- Luis Moreno-Ocampo, International Criminal Court chief prosecutor
- Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....
, philosopher
- Susan Okin, feminist political philosopher
- George Packer
George Packer is an American journalist, novelist and playwright.-Biography:Packer's parents, Nancy Packer and Herbert Packer, were both academics at Stanford University; his maternal grandfather was George Huddleston, a congressman from Alabama. His sister, Ann Packer, is also a writer...
, journalist
- Grace Paley
Grace Paley was an American-Jewish short story writer, poet, and political activist.-Biography:Grace Paley was born in the Bronx to Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. Her father was a doctor. The family spoke Russian and...
, writer and activist
- Gerald Peary
Gerald Peary is an American film critic, who has been a reviewer and columnist for the Boston Phoenix since 1996. He was formerly the Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive and is currently the General Editor of the University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Filmmakers Series...
, film critic
- Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
, literary scholar
- Rick Perlstein
Eric S. "Rick" Perlstein is an American historian and journalist. He is a former writer for The Village Voice and The New Republic....
, historian and political commentator
- Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry...
, Poet Laureate of the United States
- Eric Posner
Eric Andrew Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the son of the prominent federal appellate judge Richard Posner.-Education and clerkship:...
, professor of law
- Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science...
, philosopher
- John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
, philosopher
- Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. Ryan was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate, from 2008 to 2010...
, Poet Laureate of the United States
- John Roemer
John E. Roemer is an American economist and political scientist. He is currently the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering...
, economist
- Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...
, feminist poet
- Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
, philosopher
- Nir Rosen
Nir Rosen is an American journalist and chronicler of the Iraq War, who resides in Lebanon. Rosen writes on current and international affairs.- Journalistic and academic work :...
, journalist
- Elaine Scarry
Elaine Scarry , a professor of English and American Literature and Language, is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University...
, literary scholar
- Don Share
Don Share is an American poet. He is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee.-Career:Share was Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University from 2000 until 2007...
, poet and literary critic
- Charles Simic
Dušan "Charles" Simić is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.-Early years:...
, Poet Laureate of the United States
- Anne-Marie Slaughter
Anne-Marie Slaughter was the Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011. She is the Bert G...
, international affairs scholar
- Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
, essayist and social critic
- Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Laurence Spitzer is an American lawyer, former Democratic Party politician, and political commentator. He was the co-host of In the Arena, a talk-show and punditry forum broadcast on CNN until CNN cancelled his show in July of 2011...
, former Governor of New York
- Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
, software developer
- Nicholas Stern
Nicholas Herbert Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, Kt, FBA is a British economist and academic. He is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics , and 2010 Professor of Collège de...
, economist
- Alan A. Stone
Alan A. Stone is a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University. Stone also maintains an interest in cinema, and serves as the film critic for the Boston Review....
, professor of law, psychologist, and film critic
- Mark Strand
Mark Strand is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.- Biography :...
, Poet Laureate of the United States
- Susan Sturm, professor of law
- Cass Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who currently is the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration...
, professor of law, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
- Charles Taylor
Charles Margrave Taylor, is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions in political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and in the history of philosophy. His contributions to these fields have earned him both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the...
, philosopher
- Charles Tilly
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University....
, sociologist
- John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
, writer
- Hal Varian
Hal Ronald Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics. He is the Chief Economist at Google and he holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information...
, economist
- Eliot Weinberger
Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages...
, essayist and translator
- Stephen Walt
Stephen Martin Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Among his most prominent works are and . He coauthored The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer.-Education and career:In 1983, he received a Ph.D. in...
, international affairs scholar
- C.D. Wright, poet
- Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United...
, historian and social critic
- Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan L. Zittrain is a US professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a faculty co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society...
, professor of law
External links