Opium is a journal featuring fiction, comics, poetry and humor. Founded by Todd Zuniga

Todd Zuniga

Todd Zuniga , is the founding editor of Opium Magazine, and the co-creator and host of Literary Death Match , which is a reading series that occurs regularly in New York City, San Francisco and London, and has launched in 37 cities worldwide including Beijing, Edinburgh, Chicago and Paris.Zuniga is...

, Opium Magazine first appeared online in 2001 and in print in 2005. Opium Magazine features many notable writers and artists including Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television.-Personal Life:Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1967. He is a third child to parents who survived the Holocaust. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Shira Geffen, and...

, Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal plots and characters.-Biography:Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the distinguished creative writing MFA program at University of...

, Tao Lin

Tao Lin

Tao Lin is an American writer. He was born of Taiwanese parents and grew up on the East Coast of the USA.He is the author of two novels, Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates ; a novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel ; a short story collection, Bed ; and two poetry collections, you are a little...

, David Gaffney

David Gaffney

David Gaffney is an English writer. His best known books are the critically acclaimed novel Never Never and two books of a collection of short stories, Sawn Off Tales and Aromabingo...

, Davis Schneiderman

Davis Schneiderman

Davis Schneiderman is an American innovative writer and academic.-Biography:Schneiderman earned a B.A. from the Pennsylvania State University , an M.A. and Ph.D. from Binghamton University...

, Alison Weaver, D.B. Weiss, Diane Williams, Montana Wojczuk, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Ben Greenman

Ben Greenman

Ben Greenman is an American writer and magazine editor.-Biography:Greenman was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Miami, Florida. He attended Miami Palmetto High School and then Yale University where he worked on the Yale Herald...

, Jack Handey

Jack Handey

Jack Handey is an American humorist. He is best known for his Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey, a large body of surrealistic one-liner jokes, as well as his "Fuzzy Memories" and "My Big Thick Novel" shorts. Although many people assume otherwise, Handey is a real person, not a pen name or ...

, Dawn Raffel

Dawn Raffel

Dawn Raffel is an American short story writer and novelist. Her work hasappeared in The Quarterly, NOON, edited by Diane Williams, O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, OpenCity, Fence, Guernica, The Antioch Review, The Mississippi Review, The...

, Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek

-Personal life:Dybek was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dybek graduated from St. Rita of Cascia High School in 1959...

, Josip Novakovich

Josip Novakovich

Josip Novakovich is a Croatian American writer.His grandparents had immigrated from the Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Cleveland, Ohio, and, after the First World War, his grandfather returned to what had become Yugoslavia...

, Dan Golden, Terese Svoboda, Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy is a contemporary American writer.- Biography :Percy was born on March 28, 1979 in Eugene, Oregon, and in his early life lived briefly in Hawaii...

, Shya Scanlon, Christopher Kennedy and Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...

. Exclusive on-line material has included work by Martha Clarkson, Stacy Muszynski, Brigit Kelly Young and Iris Gribble-Neal.

Opium hosts the Literary Death Match

Literary Death Match

Literary Death Match is a reading series co-created in 2006 by Todd Zuniga, Elizabeth Koch & Dennis DiClaudio.The series features four readers who read their own writing for seven minutes or less, and are then lovingly critiqued by three judges in the categories of literary merit, performance and...

, a competitive, humor-centric reading series that features four writers in a read-off, all critiqued by three judges. Opium Europe features all-new content written solely by Europeans, in both French and English, both online and off. Opium Studio, scheduled to open in Spring 2009, is a virtual art gallery that showcases everything from wit-inspired cartoons to paintings to collage to sculpture. Opium Live is an interview series that features interviews with authors and artists.

In June 2009, Opium launched Opium 8, "The Infinity Issue," featuring conceptual artist Jonathan Keats and "The Longest Story Ever Told." To create this nine-word story, Keats used a double layer of black ink and masked the words with an incrementally screened overlay. It can be read at a pace of one word per century, or as ultraviolet light fades the overlay. According to the artist, the reading of this story is predicted to take one thousand years. Keats' work is covered worldwide including in America, Brazil, Russia, the UK, Turkey, Japan, and France.



In Fall of 2009, Opium released their ninth issue, dubbed "The Mania Issue". It features stories and poetry by writers including Jonathan Baumbach, Dawn Raffel, Dean Young, Kathleen Rooney, and Elisa Gabbert, as well as a "Fan Fiction Explosion" curated by previous Opium contributor Shya Scanlon.

External links

• Opium Den, The Portal to everything Opium
• Interview of Todd Zuniga, founding editor of Opium, February 21, 2006 Gothamist.com.
• Technovelgy.com, Where Science Meets Fiction, Interview with Jonathan Keats