Dear Ms. Esperanza: I greet you at the beginning of a great submissions process. The readers’ reports for CROSS MY HEART were wildly enthusiastic, and though it took me some time to get to it, I’m still reeling from the experience. Last night, I started reading your manuscript on the train and when I looked out the window I was in Connecticut, which was awkward, … Continue reading No Cigar by Charles Holdefer
So there I was, having sex with Joyce Carol Oates, everything going quite nicely, lights low and spirits high—it’s hard to find the words but I felt taken toward another place, a good place, the best, and then an awareness came upon me. No doubt because of the way Joyce was twisting, the angle of her arm, a shift in my gaze and a glimpse … Continue reading Dearest Reader by Charles Holdefer
It’s funny how “the universe” can sometimes make you feel like it gives enough of a shit about you to tailor schadenfreude at your expense. I say this because only this year, seven years after starting The Opiate, I decided to implement a two-dollar submission fee, from which I get $1.64 and then still have to pay a monthly fee in order to use the … Continue reading On Submission Fees and the Publishers Are Pirates Belief That’s Currently Trending
Dear Writer, Thank you for entrusting Hooligan Review with your work. Few trust us with anything. We enjoyed this piece thoroughly, but after careful consideration we could not fit it into our current issue. We tried, with smaller fonts, slender margins and even a shoehorn. Damn thing would not squeeze in. Our editors read your story several times, as we often do with work we … Continue reading Thank You; No Thank You by Max Talley
While all of Bret Easton Ellis’ novels apart from American Psycho are either unknown or underlooked by the general public, the influence of his other narratives is evident in everything from Tamas Dobozy’s “Field Recordings” (a Lunar Park style of writing oneself into the story) to Zoolander (Glamorama). Thus, it comes as no shock that Sloane Crosley’s third novel and first work of bona fide … Continue reading Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp: Like A Sequel to The Rules of Attraction
Among the many Italian authors billed as literary powerhouses, there is still, perhaps, no one who can hold a candle to Alberto Moravia. His most epic work, The Woman of Rome, is all the proof one needs of this. Released in 1949, the political undertones that become more prominent as the novel progresses cover the then recent past, a wartime era that tore the nation … Continue reading The Woman of Rome: A Love Letter to the Oldest Profession
Valeria Luiselli is something of the gamine manic pixie dream girl of the literary world–aesthetically at least. When it comes to her prose, though, there is so much more beneath the surface of her marketable look. Her second novel, The Story of My Teeth, published by Coffee House Press (who also put out the English translation of her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, and … Continue reading Collaboration Innovation: Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth
As touched on in our first issue, Gustave Flaubert’s genius lie in his ability to paint the most realist of pictures primarily because of the surreality of day-to-day living. While Madame Bovary is largely considered the pinnacle of his literary prowess, his entire canon of work offers something of the extraordinary. Flaubert, who grew up in Rouen but found himself in Paris after high school, had … Continue reading Let It Flaubert
Buy your copy of The Opiate, Vol. 1 here: [shopify product=http://theopiatemagazine-gmail-com.myshopify.com/products/the-opiate-spring-2015-vol-1] Continue reading Buy The Opiate, Vol. 1
