Lapham’s Quarterly

A history of how Peoria became a stand-in for the country surrounding it.

“The inexorable proliferation of oil and sand on the global circuits of trade tells us about the shape-shifting ways of production, colonial forms of exploitation, and our reckless wrecking of the global environmental commons.”

Water, water everywhere in the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Read the prelude.

On venerating Uncle Vincent and the saints who can never be saints.

Writer and editor Andrew Mitchell Davenport uses Jean Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance novel Cane to shed light on the ongoing reality of racial terror.

High-wire artist Philippe Petit reflects on a lifetime of fear — its sound, its body language, and how to eliminate the taste of fear from your mouth: “To fear in life is human. And difficult to avoid. And a rude awakening each time. If it seizes you, be proud of your fifteen minutes of fear.”

While on a trip hunting for bison on the Canadian tundra, Robert Moor recounts the uncanny horror of the blank, white landscape. It’s a familiar feeling for him, similar to the terror felt by any artist facing the blank white page: “The creative abyss is a snowy field”

Reflections on Angela Merkel’s and Germany’s attitude toward refugees, from a daughter of refugees who themselves fled Germany in the 1930.

The high-profile murder trial that led to America’s first successful insanity plea: It involved a congressman who shot a man he believed was having an affair with his wife.

The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was a bestselling book about sexual abuse in a convent, and it became one of the great literary frauds of the 19th century.