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 Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, politics, and culture with a global audience; we are not a local Boston news organization. We primarily publish long-form essays, substantial book reviews, political, cultural, and social analysis, and reporting and commentary on current affairs. Most essays we publish are longer than 3,000 words.

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

• We do not consider unsolicited memoirs or personal essays.
• We do not consider 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 or review on the order of one whole single-spaced page. Pitches should provide enough substance to demonstrate how you are thinking about your subject in significant and non-trivial detail. (Please do not simply list a set of questions you hope to explore; we want to know how you intend to answer them.) They should also showcase your ability to write in an engaging and accessible style for a broad readership.

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 or review proposal 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 demonstrate familiarity with other work Boston Review has published.