Lou Bahet is Co-President and Executive Editor at The Metropolitan Review, a books and culture review magazine she co-founded with Ross Barkan and David Roberts in 2025. She is a three-time Fiction and Non-Fiction Fellow of the Writers’ Institute and a recent Literary Fellow-in-Residence at the Bogliasco Center, situated on the Italian Riviera. Educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, London, and New York, Lou holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU. She is at work on a memoir about family, homecomings, and object histories, set in a New York apartment building. She also writes poetry and is on Substack.
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“The Last Untamed Writer In America.” The Wall Street Journal. Alexander Nazaryan. August 2025.
His struggles to see “A Table for Fortune” into print were the subject of an 11,000-word article by Alexander Sorondo published in March by the Metropolitan Review, a new literary journal. Despite its length, executive editor Lou Bahet said, it is the second-most-read article the site has published. In her view, that is evidence of Vollmann’s relevance, and of a hunger among many readers for serious writing.
“A lot of publishers and outlets don’t know how to meet the real demand for literary culture that clearly exists,” Bahet told me. “If someone who is regarded as a genius has to wage an epic battle to publish at this stage in his career, then what that spells for the rest of us is really concerning."
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“The Metropolitan Review Wants You to Experience the Literary Life, IRL.” The Village Voice. R.C. Baker. September 2025.
Are you a novelist? Hoping to be one? Or do you just want to argue over whatever the hell a novel might be in 2025? Well here’s your chance to ditch all those nattering URLs for an IRL meetup with the staff, subscribers, and admirers of The Metropolitan Review, the audacious, new — relatively — lit mag that looks at all facets of the Word.
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“The Sad Young Literary Man Is Alive and Well on Substack.” Vox. Constance Grady. August 2025.
[T]he kind of publications that used to host such daring, strange, and thrilling speech no longer do, and the Metropolitan Review is stepping into the breach. [Barkan] argues somewhat optimistically that the Metropolitan Review, which has around 22,000 subscribers, is “one of the more widely read literary magazines in America.”
The combined mythologies of the Metropolitan Review and Substack summer have given these writers the beginnings of a cohesive self-identity. The world they’ve built with that identity is, interestingly, a bit of a throwback.
Illustration by Ava.