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 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…

Amputation : An Exclusive Excerpt from Bruce Wagner’s Forthcoming Novel

by Bruce Wagner

March 29, 2025

The night before, Trooper the Surfer was way up in the Highlands fooling around with the trans bros—most of them were topless but still had pussies—he wasn’t a chaser but met one at the beach (Rory) who said he ‘cracked the egg about a year ago and had top surgery.’ Trooper gave his stock lifestyle-response,…

Tragedy and Its Discontents: On Moshe Zvi Marvit’s Nothing Vast

by Raina Lipsitz

March 28, 2025

One of the chief pleasures of Moshe Zvi Marvit’s sweeping family saga Nothing Vast is the way it transports you to places and times that feel soothingly distant from here and now. His characters move from Morocco and Poland to France, America, and Israel, and we meet them at various times between 1932 and 1973. Here…

The Town Where Journeys End: On The Inland Sea

by William Lambert

March 26, 2025

The train exits Matsuyama through the curving walls of pine and bamboo which give way to the city’s rural outskirts. Here, rice fields are shaved low for the winter, mowed down to a tan stubble of hardened stalks that bend and break over each other in the last phase of their growth, or the first…

The Colossus of Brooklyn: On Thomas Wolfe and Infinite Loneliness

by Aaron Lake Smith

March 24, 2025

The retreat center was attached to a grand, turn-of-the-century hotel, straight out of The Shining, manned by a skeleton crew for the winter. Wandering the grounds, I poked my head into the old lobby. Past the worn armchairs and covered grand piano, I found a musty little library with the door unlocked. There is nothing quite…

The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic

by Alexander Sorondo

March 21, 2025

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission. Then his daughter died. Then he got dropped by his publisher….

Ross Douthat’s Sandbox Universe: On Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

by Gemma Mason

March 19, 2025

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few right-leaning columnists at the New York Times, stops short of asking everyone to join him in…

The Moral Authority of a Body: On Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

by Justin Smith-Ruiu

March 18, 2025

Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs. Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a…