Lou Bahet is Co-President and Executive Editor at The Metropolitan Review, a books and culture magazine she co-founded with Ross Barkan and David Roberts in 2025. She is a four-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.
Featured Media
“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."
Illustration by Ava.