Life in a Literary Democracy

Last week, the books and culture magazine I run, The Metropolitan Review, held the launch party for its first print issue. It was a raucous time, with plenty of drinking and, thankfully, not all that much speechifying. Two hundred people packed Hurley’s, an old saloon in Midtown, and we had more enough leading lights in the crowd: reporters from the New York Times, Zohran Mamdani’s speechwriter, the Booker nominee Brandon Taylor, and Jay McInerney, the author of the legendary Bright Lights, Big City, among many others. This was night, certainly, to feel important, and I know I and the rest of the TMR team did.