Inside the Reviewnaissance

A new generation tries its hand at publishing “the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy.”

Aaron Timms, a writer and critic, was standing in a corner at TJ Byrnes, an Irish pub in New York’s financial district, explaining the Paris Métro. “They’re building a network that is going to allow better connections between the different suburbs,” he was telling me when a woman cut him off. “Hey,” she said, making her way through the busy, low-lit backroom. “I loved your piece.” Timms had written about the suburbs in the newest issue of the New York Review of Architecture (NYRA). The roomful of young media types and design buffs had gathered under the pub’s stained-glass lamps that evening to celebrate the issue’s launch.

Founded in 2019, NRYA is a New York–based publication that publishes architecture criticism, though its reach extends far beyond that world. NYRA, unlike other design publications, aims to appeal to the literary crowd that older small magazines like n+1 and The Baffler draw. The latest issue includes a piece by Kate Wagner, The Nation’s architecture critic, on the demolition of the East Wing of the White House; an appraisal of the Villa Charlotte Brontë, in the Bronx; and an essay about castle keepers. And it’s not the only new effort of its kind. Recent years have seen the rise of a number of niche publications covering topics ranging from business to fine art to cemeteries: the New York Review of Finance, the Metropolitan Review, the Whitney Review of New Writing, the Graveyard Review, the Manhattan Art Review, the San Francisco Review of Whatever. These projects have been successful by some measures: their events are well-attended, and print editions can fetch ten dollars apiece. Chloe Wyma, NYRA’s deputy editor, told me that we’re living in the “reviewnaissance.”