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.
A new editorial team is overseeing the magazine’s comeback, with Hohn, a longtime contributor, serving as editor, and Prose helping to guide the publication as editor at large. Both previously worked alongside Lapham as occasional co-editors and are members of the editorial board.
“We really need to demonstrate to the world that this magazine will survive its namesake editor,” said Hohn.
Toward the end of Lapham’s life, the future of the quarterly looked bleak. In 2023, the financially struggling journal stopped putting out issues and its staff was furloughed. Its website and podcast were dormant.
But behind the scenes, frantic work was being done to secure the magazine’s future. This March, Paul W. Morris, the publisher and executive director, announced that Lapham’s would live on at Bard, a liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
An academic institution felt like a fitting home for a publication dedicated to history and literature, Prose said. Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities is taking on the magazine’s assets, including its archives, back issue inventory and intellectual property, and its list of some 17,500 subscribers. Bard acquired the quarterly for free from the American Agora Foundation, the nonprofit that had published the magazine.
Its survival is all the more remarkable at a time when many literary journals are struggling. In recent months, small publications have faced new funding challenges after the Trump administration canceled some government grants to publishers.
Prose, who teaches at Bard, said the continuity of Lapham’s legacy feels especially crucial at a moment when support for principles like academic freedom and consensus on historical facts seems to be eroding.
“It’s more important than ever that this magazine survives,” Prose said. “It acknowledges the importance of history and art and thought — all things that seem to be threatened now.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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