“This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly illuminates the mystery of friendship, a relationship that, potentially offering both pleasure and pain, sustenance and suffering, so closely resembles the mystery of love,” writes Francine Prose in her preamble to the new issue. Friendship features passages from Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Aristotle, Mariana Enriquez, and Derek Walcott, along with an original essay by B.D. McClay, that address the ways in which friendship can bring out the best and worst qualities in people. As William Makepeace Thackeray wrote in 1848, “Under the magnetism of friendship, the modest man becomes bold, the shy confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful.”