Spring Arts Preview 2014

It’s a new day. We’ve got a mayor who’s promised to appoint a citywide arts czar—and keep the bars, and the T, open till the early morning. No more excuses, Boston: It’s fun time. As we thaw out from a bone-chilling winter, we’ve gathered the city’s top culture vultures to help you get reacquainted with that smoking-hot creative economy you’ve been hearing so much about. Ready?

Meet Sarah Paine Stuart, New England’s next great memoirist who explores the high cost of living on our quaint revolutionary roads in Perfectly Miserable. In addition, check out 10 titles from local literary heavyweights, from the finish line to the Senate.

Guns and rock ’n’ roll, old American quilts and modern Mexican couture, paintings of shining seas, New York streets, and America the beautiful are some of the sights in store around Boston this spring. Plus: a rare visit from one of the founding documents of Western democracy.

Magic, music, the media, and a modicum of gore get splashed across Boston stages this spring—along with Pushkin, Sontag, Sondheim, Shakespeare, and a couple of polar bears.

Meet a lab that’s creating a new kind of cinema. Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, an interdisciplinary program scattered about the university draws on the resources of the Harvard Film Archive, the Film Study Center, and the Anthropology Department.

Read about the good, the bad, and the Lake Street Dive. Plus: festivals, homecomings, and triumphs of “local losers” help Boston thaw after a long, cold winter—and conductor Benjamin Zander returns for a vigorous second act.