The Last Literary Lion of New York, Gay Talese: The Editors’ Interview. Ross Barkan & Lou Bahet. October 2025.

On a warm afternoon in August, we had the pleasure of visiting Talese to conduct an interview that lasted nearly three hours and ranged over every topic conceivable: Sinatra, Trump, boxing, adultery, the writing life, the nudist life, the importance of dressing well. . . . Talese is strikingly undiminished, both regal and sprightly, not merely a bridge to the glittering midcentury but a full embodiment of its promise.

Getting Even: Talese’s Long-Lost New York Fiction. Gay Talese. November 2025.

You may have noticed during our interview that Talese made a brief, passing mention of a lone short story published in Mademoiselle that he wrote in 1966, “Getting Even,” his first and last foray into fiction. That detail beguiled our Executive Editor, Lou Bahet, who began to wonder about the fate of this nearly six-decade-old magazine short story. She started searching for the piece, scouring periodical archives and databases, but found that it was lost to time. There was little public record of its existence, it had never been anthologized, and even the precise issue date of its publication proved elusive. Finally, buried within a web archive of 1960s women’s lifestyle magazines, she found a crude digital scan of “Getting Even” in Mademoiselle’s May 1967 summer beauty issue. She printed it out and read it by candlelight at a lonesome Midtown bar. When she put down the pages after midnight, she felt certain that “Getting Even” was nothing less than a forgotten masterpiece of noirish city writing.

The Last Untamed Writer In America. Alexander Nazaryan. August 2025.

[Vollmann’s] 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."

Why “The Metropolitan Review” Stands Out in a New Literary Revival. Ash Carter. April 2026.

In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick surveyed the critical scene and judged it “a puddle of treacle.” Today, that puddle is at a dangerously low ebb. The books pages that made her Sunday mornings “a dismal experience” have now all but disappeared. Even the once mighty Washington Post nixed its section a few months ago. But there are green shoots amid the wasteland. So many new literary magazines have sprouted in the past few years that the Columbia Journalism Review has decreed we are in a “reviewassance.” Of these new, often similarly named publications, my favorite is The Metropolitan Review. Edited by Ross Barkan and Lou Bahet, T.M.R. publishes two to four pieces per week on Substack. This month, they released their first print issue, featuring cover boy Gay Talese. Refreshingly, it’s a magazine with no house style or party line. Just lively, original writing.

Kids’ Gay ol’ time. Oli Coleman. April 2026.

New York’s young crop of journalists had a cold one in Gay Talese’s honor, we hear. Guests at Hurley’s Saloon in Times Square included “half the Times,” such as Michael Grynbaum, Anna Kodé and Dodai Stewart, Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright, Max Tani of Semafor, Matt Starr and Jay McInerney. Officially a release party for the first print issue of Ross Barkan and Lou Bahet’s Metropolitan Review, the bash doubled as a tribute to one of the city’s greats. Talese expert Alex Vadukul of the Times advised on the issue, which features an interview with the New Journalism pioneer. “He’s now 94, but all the literary youngs came out,” said a spy of the “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” writer. “He couldn’t come [because of his age], but his daughters did, Pamela and Catherine.”

One for the monied. Oli Coleman. June 2026.

This was the other kind of high net. While most New Yorkers were watching the Knicks game, some tore their eyes away from the Garden to celebrate the success of Carson Griffith’s newsletter, Rich People S--t. Packing the Manner in Soho were Mario Carbone and his fiancée, Cait Bailey, Park Avenue plastic surgeons Dr. Sean Alemi and Dr. Darren Smith, Cultured magazine’s Sarah Harrelson, Carole Radziwill, Candace Bushnell, political commentator Molly Jong-Fast, Derek Blasberg, the Times’ Alex Vadukul, Michael Grynbaum and Jessica Testa, Lou Bahet of the Metropolitan Review, Nayeema Raza of the “Smart Girl Dumb Questions” podcast and Dan Wakeford of the Celebrity Intelligence newsletter. “The room felt like a live-action version of the newsletter,” we’re told.

In Plain Sight. Lachlan Cartwright. April 2026.

The Metropolitan Review celebrated its Gay Talese special issue at Hurley’s saloon in Midtown last Thursday with an eclectic group drawn from the writing world. The publication’s Executive Editor, Lou Bahet, and her co-editor, Ross Barkan, had painstakingly put the issue together, which includes an interview with the legendary writer. Bahet, who also serves as the publication’s art director, even found a rare work of Talese’s that they have republished: a piece of fiction that was first published by Mademoiselle magazine in a May 1967 issue.

Inside the Reviewnaissance: A new generation tries its hand at publishing “the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy.” Carolina Abbott Galvão. February 2026.

Recent years have seen the rise of a number of niche publications covering topics ranging from business to fine art to cemeteries: the New York Review of Finance, the Metropolitan Review, the Whitney Review of New Writing. . . . Chloe Wyma, NYRA’s deputy editor, told me that we’re living in the “reviewnaissance.” That is a notable statement in part because the past few years have not been kind to critics. The Associated Press stopped publishing book reviews last year; Vanity Fair fired its chief critic; the New York Times reassigned four arts critics. Most recently, amid a round of mass layoffs, the Washington Post shut down its books section. And yet there’s a world where the art of the review is alive and well. . . . If the review sections of newspapers are closing down, there’s a sense that this moment could make room for a meatier, weirder kind of criticism.

The Metropolitan Review Wants You to Experience the Literary Life, IRL. 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.

The Sad Young Literary Man Is Alive and Well on Substack. 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. . . . 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.