The Loneliness Issue: Now Available

Spring 2026 brings The Loneliness Issue: a meditation on all things reclusive, deserted, secluded, and solitary. We open with Kurt Andersen reflecting on Edward Hopper’s Room in New York, which is featured on the cover. “The standard take on Edward Hopper,” Andersen writes, “is that he’s the great visual chronicler of the loneliness, alienation, and anomie of Americans and America in the rah-rah American Century. That cliché, like most clichés, isn’t entirely untrue, but Hopper resisted it. ‘The loneliness thing,’ he told an art journalist who interviewed him near the end of his life in the 1960s, ‘is overdone.'”

Poetry in the issue includes work by Andrew Garvin, L. A. Johnson, Alex Tretbar, Adam O. Davis, Winniebell Xinyu Zong, Ross White, and many more. David Hernandez keeps us company with five new poems exploring the self and the body, including “Self-Portrait without a Body.” In “Mother,” Christtie Jay writes: “The grave does not stop / at my feet, it climbs my legs, hips, throat, rocking / what’s left of my breath.” Aimee Nezhukumatathil has us walk in her childhood red Mary Janes in “The Immigrant’s Very Good Daughter.”

In nonfiction, we’re excited to feature Jamila Osman’s essay “Dream Girl,” which won the 2025 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Osman writes: “The weight of what I remember is a force strong enough to eject me from the world, but it is also the only road that returns me to it.” In “You Are Not Holden Caulfield,” Jeremy Tavares takes us to a boxing ring in Thailand. And in “Censoring Prairie Schooner,” editor in chief Timothy Schaffert tells the story behind “Anniversary” by Ervin Krause (also included in the issue), which gained notoriety after former Schooner editor in chief Karl Shapiro resigned following the university’s censorship of the short story.

Fiction in the issue includes work by Terese Svoboda, Elizabeth Crane, Cynthia Sylvester, Ciara Alfaro, Robert Brian Mulder, Milena Nigam, and Ervin Krause. In Olufunke Ogundimu’s “The Bird That Cries Mayday,” a German warplace crashes in British colonial Nigeria in 1942. And in Matt Barrett’s “The Long Save,” the narrator writes of a man whose life their father saved: “He had asked my father once: What’s your dream? And my father told him, but I don’t know what his answer was.”

You can see the full table of contents and read excerpts from the issue on our website, or order a copy through our online store.