2 days ago
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- New York Times
Lapham's Quarterly Will Begin Its Revival with Website and Podcast
The literary journal Lapham's Quarterly is relaunching its website and podcast this summer under the editorial guidance of the writers Donovan Hohn and Francine Prose — a fortuitous and surprising turn for a magazine that seemed on the brink of extinction.
Starting this week, Lapham's will revive its weekly podcast, 'The World in Time.' In coming days, new online features and editorial commentary will be published on its website, including installments of the quarterly's centerpiece section, 'Voices in Time,' which showcases provocative writing from historical figures, philosophers and thinkers.
The first podcast episode, due out this Friday, will be hosted by Hohn, and will include audio clips from a keynote address that the journal's founder, Lewis Lapham, gave in 2011 at Bard College, a prescient speech about the urgent need for truth telling.
Another episode airing on Saturday is devoted to memorializing Lapham, who died last summer at the age of 89. It will feature recorded audio from his memorial service, where notable authors and artists spoke, among them Alec Baldwin, Christopher Lloyd, Oskar Eustis and Ben Metcalf.
Next year, editors hope to restart production of print issues. Elaborately designed, they revolved around a single broad theme, like youth, war, money or happiness, and featured long-form articles, essays and excerpts from historical texts. (Famous bylines included Thucydides, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Sun Tzu.)
In a media landscape where most publications are relentlessly chasing breaking news and online trends, Lapham's seemed almost defiantly averse to following the news cycle. When Lapham founded the publication in 2007, his goal was 'to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present,' he later told The New York Times.
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