Thank you for your interest in writing for Boston Review! We welcome submissions of essays and book reviews through this form. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

Boston Review is a general interest magazine of ideas, politics, and culture. We primarily publish long-form argumentative essays; substantial and ambitious review essays; political, social, and cultural analysis; and occasional reporting and commentary on current affairs. Most essays we publish are between 2,500 and 4,000 words.

We welcome submissions of complete drafts as well as of pitches, 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.
• We do not consider proposals for work shorter than 2,000 words.
• We only consider submissions from people, not from AIs. Submit your own work, not the work of another person or of an AI.

1. We consider drafts between 2,000 and 6,000 words. If you submit a complete draft, please include a shorter summary or description of the piece in your cover letter.

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, providing a mini-prospectus or précis of your thinking. Pitches should give enough substance to demonstrate your vision for the essay in significant and non-trivial detail—enough to illustrate the richness and originality of what you have to say, rather than simply assert that you have something to say. For example, please do not list questions or topics you want to explore; we want to know how you intend to answer or develop them. Pitches should also showcase your ability to write in an engaging and accessible style for a broad readership.

3. Our review essays mostly cover nonfiction (see our archive of nonfiction review essays here), though we also welcome submissions on literature, film, art, and culture. We seek review essays that go beyond simple summary or flat evaluation to make a compelling and original argument comparable to a feature essay. We do not consider narrowly conceived reviews of a single novel, poetry collection, or film. However, newly published or released work can serve as a good occasion for a feature piece of literary or cultural criticism, a wide-ranging profile of a writer’s life and work, an assessment of a cultural or artistic trend, or an intervention in a broader literary, intellectual, or political debate that transcends narrow assessment or evaluation of a single work.

4. We usually publish review essays 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 in other venues.

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

6. Submissions perform much better when they demonstrate familiarity with other work Boston Review has published.