The Metropolitan Review

https://metropolitanreview.com/

Magazine, Online

Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, Criticism Reviews, Essays, Interviews, Reviews, Visual Art

2025

Brooklyn, New York

Ross Barkan

Editor-in-Chief

[email protected]

What is The Metropolitan Review? At heart, it is a book and culture review publication — a website, a Substack, and a print magazine. We will regularly publish new reviews concerning recent and older work, whether they be novels, non-fiction, film, television, music, or visual art. We will publish essays that discourse on all of these. We will be committed to the review function, to telling you exactly what it is we think about what has appeared before us. Newspapers have mostly abandoned their book review sections, and a great deal of criticism, these days, tends to read like public relations. We want to restore the trust in the critic. And we want writers to think and write how they’d like to, without an all-consuming house style to sand away their individuality. We believe in ambition and experimentation, and we stand against dull language. No two pieces will sound alike in The Metropolitan Review. Iceberg theorists need not apply. “The first function of a literary magazine, surely, is to introduce the work of new or little known writers of talent,” T.S. Eliot once wrote. “The second is to provide critical valuation of the work of living authors, both famous and unknown.” This is what we believe. We cannot ignore what is coming from the conglomerates or the mainstream. We will be honest brokers, telling you plainly whether the engineered hype offers a semblance of truth or it’s all dross dressed up in superlatives. Just as important, though, we will seek out the unknown, or those who have not been selectively uplifted by any kind of publicity mechanism. This will be a publication where you can read about Sally Rooney and a self-published author, or Percival Everett and a writer who, like Everett once upon a time, produces innovative work with small presses. We will have no party line; we will seek to wrestle with, honestly and fiercely, new literature and new ideas. There is no deficit of genius in the 2020s. There is only a deficit of attention among those resting at the top of enervated institutions who are losing interest in what is coursing below them. Editors at large publishing houses don’t want to nurture the fledgling careers of writers who haven’t yet found large followings. Critics race to review and profile the same select authors, leaving behind a mass of talent who, for reasons they have no control over, were never anointed in the first place. The border now encroaches on the center. We live in a time when elites are distrusted and their institutions have come in for reckoning, much of it deserved. We at The Metropolitan Review do believe in institutions — only better ones, ones that do not fail to harness the fresh energies pulsing all around them. Finally, there’s print. Print, it has been said, is dead. But that is not actually true. There are many new, exciting literary publications that have begun this decade which exist as print magazines and journals. We plan to join them because the contemporary reader, assaulted by screens for much of their waking life, craves a reprieve. Language lives differently in print, and physical, tactile artifacts have gained new importance in this era of digitized ephemera. We love a beautiful print product and plan to produce one. The aim is for The Metropolitan Review, in time, to appear several times per year.

Yes

https://www.metropolitanreview.org/about

Year round

no

cash

no

https://x.com/the_met_review

https://www.instagram.com/metropolitanreview/?hl=en

200,000

Several times per week

3

$30

$80

24,300 online

300+ print

Hemlock