Essays and Book Reviews

Thank you for your interest in writing for Boston Review! We welcome submissions of essays and book reviews of through this form.

Please note that we are a general interest magazine of ideas, politics, and culture with an international audience; we are not a local Boston news organization. We primarily publish long-form essays, substantial book reviews, political, cultural, and social analysis, and occasional reporting and commentary on current affairs. We do not publish op-eds or essays written in an op-ed style, and we do not accept unsolicited personal essays. Most essays we publish are longer than 3,000 words.

We have a very small editorial staff. We try to review the large number of submissions we receive within a month of the submission date, but delays can occasionally lead to much longer response times. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

1. We consider drafts between 2,000 and 6,000 words subject to these limitations:

• We do not accept unsolicited memoirs or personal essays.
• We do not accept op-eds or pieces written in an op-ed style.

2. If you are submitting a pitch instead of a draft, please describe your vision for the essay in significant detail, on the order of one whole single-spaced page. Please provide enough substance to demonstrate your understanding of the subject matter, showcase your ability to write in an engaging style for a general audience, sketch the argument you intend to make, and convey the stakes of the issue for a broad readership. (Please do not simply list questions you want to explore; we want to know how you intend to answer them.)

3. We usually publish reviews only within six months of the publication or release date of the work under review. It is best to submit reviews as close as possible to the release date of the work under review, ideally in advance. By timing reviews in this way, we hope they have a chance to influence the terms of public debate and reach a very broad audience. But we make exceptions to this rule depending on the strength of a review and the amount and quality of coverage a work has already gotten.

4. If you have published work elsewhere, please include links to examples of your other writing.

5. Submissions perform much better when they show familiarity with work Boston Review has published. Please read a few of our essays before you submit to get a sense of the style and substance we are looking for.