Essays and Book Reviews

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

Please note that Boston Review is a general interest magazine of ideas, politics, and culture; we are not a local Boston news organization. We primarily publish long-form argumentative essays, substantial and ambitious book reviews, political, cultural, and social analysis, and reporting and commentary on current affairs. Most essays we publish are between 2,500 and 4,000 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.
• We do not consider previously published work, including work that already appears online on blogs or platforms like Substack.

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—a sort of mini-prospectus or précis of your thinking. Pitches should give enough substance to demonstrate how you are thinking about your subject in significant and non-trivial detail—enough to illustrate the richness and originality of what you have to say, rather than simply claim that you have something to say. (For example, please do not list a set of questions or topics you want to explore; we want to know how you intend to answer them.) Pitches 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.