We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that we took for granted in the twentieth century. So much mainstream art can feel like a pale imitation of yesterday, marketers at the top chasing specters of what was successful a generation ago. “Artificial intelligence” is no longer an insult — wasn’t artifice to be avoided at all costs, plastic a much-deserved insult? — and tech behemoths long to jam us so full of cultural slop that we won’t be able to think coherently again.
But we are optimists, even when beholding this desiccated landscape: conglomeration among the major publishers, a Hollywood serially devoid of risk-taking, a counterculture withering as alternative newspapers disappear, and criticism giving way to self-satisfied celebrations of mediocrity. The poptimists, in one sense, won. Philistines trammel the Earth. It’s a nice moment to proudly proclaim, like the legendary Sam Bankman-Fried, that you’ve never read a book.
We, at The Metropolitan Review, read books. Today is our launch day. Our founders are Ross Barkan, Lou Bahet, and David Roberts. You may know our work from Substack or a variety of other publications. For the last few years, we have watched as the culture, despite the damage done by slothful and inward-gazing elites, starts to reconstitute itself. This has happened on Substack, where the most ambitious, talented, and idiosyncratic writers now reside, the sort who would have been booming across the pages of the Village Voice a half century ago but now maintain popular newsletters. We are lovers of Substack, but also institutions. We desire publications that engage with new literature and allow writers to be freely, and entirely, themselves.
What is The Metropolitan Review? At heart, it is a book and culture review publication — a website, a Substack, and a forthcoming print magazine. Today, you will find five reviews and essays on our new website — with many more to come. 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.
Substack is a major part of that salutary transformation. At this moment no literary publication can begin life and not operate there. Like all tech platforms, it is imperfect, and we are not here to perform their public relations. But it is undeniable that writers have clustered on Substack for a reason. All reviews and essays that run on The Metropolitan Review website will also appear on our Substack. If you want to read us in your inbox, you will have that option. That community is our community. We will happily race into the future, together.
We are not only a Substack. Our website will update every week with new work. We believe both are essential: to exist within the Substack universe and beyond it. We encourage you to subscribe to the Substack and to visit our website. Both are worth your while. It is our hope that, as time goes by, The Metropolitan Review will continue to add features and will be not just a publication but a hub for the community of literati and true believers who are congregating on Substack and online.
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.
For all the dourness of the current moment — an unstable body politic, an unceasing drive towards inhumanism from our cultural producers and technology overlords — there has never been a better time to start a new publication. There’s a great and growing hunger for literature and culture that enlivens, not slackens. We want to make it new, again.
Please consider making a pledge for a subscription to our Substack. A subscription for just $80 a year brings with it access to the print publication. We are a not-for-profit organization and we are slightly different from the majority of Substacks in that we pay all of our writers at market rates. We believe that this is vital — above all, to help acknowledge many of the talented writers who are emerging in this space — but, obviously, it adds up. Your financial support is crucial to this enterprise. In particular, we are fundraising for our print publication and are dependent on your subscriptions to make it happen. We strongly believe that that publication will go a long way towards showcasing, and enshrining in print, the innovative work that’s occurring in this online space.
And please pitch us! — at editors@metropolitanreview.com. Let us know if you are interested in writing a review, if you have a suggestion of a new book (or film, or artwork) that should be considered for a review. We view this as genuinely a community endeavor. We hope you join us.
—The Editors
This sounds amazing. I am all in. One question – will you allow reviewers to use pen names? I ask because it is often risky for an author, particularly a newer author, to write an honest review under their own name. It’s a small community, and we strive very hard to maintain goodwill with our peers. However, I am genuinely interested in what authors think of of books that aren’t their own. I think published authors have a unique perspective on what makes a book tick. But it’s hard to really say what you think when you’re writing under your own name.
Very happy to hear about the print edition. Also, I like this intro "We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack." Reads like a performance audit report of our high culture, even using some of the keywords performance auditors use such as "institutional lack" and "not as it should be" and I love that. 👍