On the cold blister of a dead, broken highway walked the spectral blurs of three figures. A minuscule speck of dim light glowed from the center of the group. Ethereal beings? Perhaps…once upon a long ago time. Now just three individuals looking for a hot meal and a dry bed. The light itself felt like a memory, was nothing but a feeble tin lantern to guide their way, … Continue reading Three Strangers by Josiah Golojuh
Earlier this year, Sloane Crosley released a book called Grief Is for People. Detailing the loss of her close friend and mentor, Russell Perreault, it is, in many ways, a spawn of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (this connection can be read about more in-depth in the Vol. 37 issue of The Opiate). Crosley, accordingly, is not shy about referencing it a few … Continue reading What If The Year of Magical Thinking Is Actually A Book About the Hazards of Codependency?
He got me with The Thin Man. But first he had to get my attention. It wasn’t tough. Colin had all the equipment: pearl-gray eyes, fauxhawk hair and a deft way of embedding words like “soporific” and “inculcate” in that vermouth-over-ice voice of his. I’d come to the bar as a refugee from a recent breakup. So had he. We found our way to a … Continue reading Thin Man Binge by Steven Fromm
It was with a pep in his step that Robert Quinlan, a recently retired corporate attorney hailed in his firm’s parting tribute for, among other fine qualities, his “unfailing courtliness,” emerged one bright autumn morning from a 66th Street medical building. Here he was, the brand-new recipient of a cardiologist’s clean bill of health, which followed last week’s thumbs up from his general practitioner, and on … Continue reading The Office of the Presidency by Michael Tilley
I don’t know. Can you drink enough coffee to keep properly alert all night just staring at a fresh dead body? Listening for the slightest sound? That most delicate twitch of the lips. A finger twitch. We do it, but come morning, who can remember if they’ve managed to stay fully awake enough to do the job? There’s always that chance you’ve drifted off and … Continue reading A New Sittin’ Up by Larry D. Thacker
Perhaps because so few people care about the publishing world outside of, well, the publishing world, there aren’t nearly enough “taking the ‘literature business’ to task” movies (instead, there are plenty of “taking the movie business to task” offerings [see: Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Player, Barton Fink, Adaptation, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Babylon, among others]). Though it could be quite a … Continue reading One-Two Punch: American Fiction and The Other Black Girl Lampoon the Publishing Industry for Its Views on What a “Black” Book Is
Mark, Phillip and Greg had been out of school just two weeks, but were already immersed in the intoxication of summer. In seven years, they would be part of the 1985 graduating class of Indian Hills High School but that was a lifetime away. The dread of starting sixth grade would hit them maybe around mid-August but, for now, their freedom was unbounded. The weather … Continue reading Summer Spell by Garvin Livingston
She watched her husband drink his beer in the amphitheater as the loud music washed over them. So joyous in the moment. What a shame. “I am so fucking psyched for this concert.” He leaned forward as if listening intently. “Wow, sounds really different.” “He’s sounded different for like twenty years.” She studied him. “I mean compared to the records I own.” “Those albums were … Continue reading Scraping the Bucket by Max Talley
The following is an interview conducted between The Opiate Books’ Anton Bonnici and the publishing house’s star author, Tate Carmichael, who released Lindsay Lohan Stole My Life earlier this year. Although it’s not always easy to pin the (ex-)socialite down, she was able to make time in her busy roster of prison activities to speak with Mr. Bonnici, a lowly plebe not worthy of a … Continue reading A Date With Tate: Interviewing Miss Carmichael
You know what’s worse than a family dinner? I’ll tell you: a fucking wedding dinner. Every random relative that you’ve ever encountered once, three millenniums ago, and whose existences are perfectly inconsequential to you but apparently primordial to the familial circle, reunited in the same room. Annoyance grated me as I observed people, whose blood was the only thing we had in common, hypocritically saluting … Continue reading Family Matters by Sarah Siham
