Some of you know I’m the cartoon editor at The Metropolitan Review, one of the great young literary magazines in the country. (I mostly argue about page three.) The real magic comes from Ross Barkan, Lou Bahet and the rest of the team.
On Thursday 15th October, we’re throwing our big fall bash: The Metropolitan Review Reading Series, Vol. 5, from 8-11pm at The Bench, 49 Elizabeth St. You’ll hear from Brandon Taylor, Lincoln Michel, Django Ellenhorn, Cally Fiedorek, Baylina Pu, and Adam Pearson, and then you get to party deep into the night. Maybe the morning.
We’ve already sold a bunch of tickets, but there are still a few left. $10 suggested donation; pay what you want. Sounds like a decent deal? Grab your ticket here.
Anyway. I wrote this back in May.
Then I rewrote it in July.
Then again in September. Eventually I figured I just have to hit publish.
Here ‘tis.
Hurley’s Bar, Midtown NYC
A Blurry Thursday in May 2026
One foggy Thursday, I wedged myself into Hurley’s -an old Midtown bar that smells like spilt whiskey and the ambition of men who died before I was born -to celebrate the launch of The Metropolitan Review’s first print issue.
We planned for a crowd. What showed up was a biblical flood.
You could measure the night's success by how impossible it was to move. Two hundred bodies crammed into a room that would’ve been cosy with sixty, all of us packed in like straphangers, except the train never came and nobody wanted it to.
The drinks came like a flooded water main. You couldn’t move three feet without baptising a stranger in gin. I personally anointed a New York Times reporter (sorry, Alex Vadukul), a Booker Prize nominee, and the sleeve of Jay McInerney himself, who looked like he’d stepped fully formed out of a first edition of his own novel and was now, regrettably, slightly damp.
I apologised. He said something gracious. I have no idea what, because the room was louder than a tarmac.
For one night, we all got to live inside the literary world we’d been fantasising about for years -the one that exists in old documentaries and biopics (and nowhere else, really.)
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The old guard was there too, mind you. But the thing that got me, somewhere around drink two, was that they’d come to us. Into a too-tiny upstairs bar with no guest list and no velvet rope, where the only way to reach the great man was to spill a drink on him. Nobody in that room was being granted an audience. We’d simply stopped waiting for one.
That’s the bit nobody tells you about the act of tearing down the gate -the people who used to guard them still turn up. They just have to queue at the same bar as everyone else now. No secret handshake at the door. No bullshit Ivy League password. No agent pedigree check. The prestige came to the party; the party didn’t have to go begging for the prestige.
That realisation was intoxicating. (Or that was the scotch.) By that point, the two had formed a working partnership.
Look to the edges of any good New York literary party, and you’ll find the bones of it, sulking in a booth. Past the grinning faces and the clinking glasses, writers had gathered in the classic dark leather booths, lit from above by bulbs the wattage of a dying firefly. It looked like a still from a 1970s noir, the dialogue costumed to match. They were trading war stories from the front lines of publishing, (and the front lines, I regret to report, is a fucking mess.)