Lapham's Quarterly

10/01/2025

J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its file on James Baldwin in April 1960 when Baldwin’s name appeared among the signatories to an open letter that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee published as an advertisement in the New York Times. In one memo preserved in the file, Hoover describes Baldwin as “a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety of the United States in a time of emergency.”

The FBI reads James Baldwin.

09/26/2025

Charles Baxter visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Moby Dick.

The latest episode of The World in Time.

08/24/2025

Come, lean in for this song of myself.
Bear with me these tides of telling.
Days without dawn, nights of no end,
the oceans upturning. I cannot calm
the surge within; I cannot stop the wave
from breaking: lost to the lookout,
watchful at prow, my keel-hand
shaking in the spill; driven too much
toward rocks. Cold to my cage,
my feet unfound, these bones a scaffold of frost;
then the starvation inside: mere-weary to core,
more worry than care.

Read a selection from The Seafarer.

A reading from a new translation of The Seafarer.

08/22/2025

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with poet Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the world from which this mysterious tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem emerged, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists.

The latest episode of The World in Time.

08/13/2025

“Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the best of times,’ and people would get it backwards. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Because it establishes this kind of—you know, so much of the book is about authority. About authority, and the lack of authority, and what authority is, and who has it, and what you do with it. And that sentence is just pure authority. Pure narrative authority. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Bingo. It’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to call you Ishmael.’”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

08/11/2025

I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words. I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.

The key word for me here is not fun, play—but discover. I live for those moments when something appears on the page as if of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.

In 1965, Bob Dylan described his song “Like a Rolling Stone” as “twenty pages of vomit,” boiled down to a point of hatred—well, he said later, maybe ten pages—but much later, almost fifty years later, he described it very differently. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that,” he said, talking to Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. “It gives you the song and then it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”

That’s an evocative, romantic account of what anyone who engages in any sort of creative activity experiences at any time. For a lot of people, that sense of an evanescent gift, the genie granting you a wish even if you never asked for it—that sense of visitation—is what it’s all for: a moment of inexplicable clarity.

An essay from What Nails It.

08/01/2025

25% off all Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, from now until Labor Day. Which issues do you still need for your collection? https://ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app/live/backissues?org=AAF&publ=LQ&appl=BIP

08/01/2025

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with Roger Berkowitz, writer, scholar, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

The latest episode of The World in Time.

07/29/2025

Aaron Sachs on Herman Melville’s cosmic cetology.

Herman Melville’s cosmic cetology.

07/27/2025

“Moby Dick was read to me by my mother when I was maybe five or six. She made a deal with me that she would continue to read the story as long as I could remember on the following night where the story had gotten to. Reading usually took place around six in the evening, and she would quiz me as to where we were and how far on its voyage the Pequod had gotten and what was doing with Queequeg and Captain Ahab. If I failed the quiz, she did not read it to me. I would have to wait another day.”

As told to Aidan Flax-Clark.

07/25/2025

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale.”

Listen to the latest episode of the podcast: a conversation with Wyatt Mason about Moby Dick, plus plenty of archival audio featuring Lewis Lapham on one of his favorite books.

The latest episode of The World in Time.

07/22/2025

Read a grand tour through the essays of Lewis H. Lapham.

“It is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader,” Lewis reminds us, “that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.”

In his introductory essay for the inaugural issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis wrote (as he often had before) about his “risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice.” If he read a piec