Welcome to The Metropolitan Review

by The Editors

January 27, 2025

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…

The Gray Man Theory: On Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good

by Henry Begler

April 16, 2025

A terrible thing has recently happened to me. I have become obsessed with the golden era of American magazines. This grave affliction manifests itself in several symptoms. First, it causes one’s reading list to grow to enormous length. Just when you think you’ve discovered the last memoir about answering phones at the midcentury New Yorker,…

Indie, Please: On Daniel Falatko’s The Wayback Machine

by Ross Barkan

April 14, 2025

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to many rock shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick. The neighborhoods, like me, were a bit scruffier then. The glass monoliths had not yet swallowed up the waterfront. PBRs were a buck, never more. The men kept their shirts earnestly plaid and their jeans earnestly tight. I…

The Man Without a Past: On the Sublimity of Jay Gatsby

by George Monaghan

April 10, 2025

Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsby, which has left the English thanking Americans and the Americans thanking English for a century…

Up Close With the Beauty of Gatsby: On Teaching (And Reading) an American Classic

by Emma Heath

April 9, 2025

The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read it in high school and college, and now am a member of the great tribe of…

America the Beautiful: The Great Gatsby as Romantic Poetry

by John Pistelli

April 7, 2025

We could ask this question in two different ways. First, it might be remarkable that he was able to write any masterpieces at all, even if only one. A chronicler of his age’s excesses in gossipy romans à clef, a middling-to-poor student of elite institutions, a status-conscious social climber from a downwardly mobile Midwestern family,…

April Fools: A Short Story About Adolescence and Suicide

by Savannah Horton

April 5, 2025

The boy died on the first of April, so the police were slow to respond. The first of April was a big day for false alarms. My mother worked dispatch for Alachua and fielded all the calls. Every year, she listened to teenagers report cases of mammoth erections and spontaneous combustion. Maybe twice a decade,…

Childhood is Over: On Adam Ross’ Playworld

by Jonah Allon

April 4, 2025

It happens suddenly, sometimes before we even recognize it, and we don’t get any say. We might be slow to acknowledge it; we might even resist it. But we can’t avoid it, or wish it away. Eventually we learn to process it, accept it, move forward. What other choice do we have? Adulthood comes for…

The Devil and Mary Gaitskill: On Sex (and Hopelessness) in Fiction

by Pete Tosiello

April 2, 2025

Among the dozens of stories Mary Gaitskill has published since her 1988 debut Bad Behavior, only one — “Secretary,” a detached BDSM narrative from that collection — has been loosely adapted for the screen. On its face, this fact is not entirely surprising. Gaitskill is, above all else, a prose stylist, renowned more for short fiction…

Searching for Bigger: Where is the Black Working Class in Contemporary Literary Fiction?

by Luke McGowan-Arnold

March 31, 2025

A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels and was a seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance. W.E.B. Du Bois hated it. Du Bois wrote…