Blog

Jennifer Cody Epstein

Gather Togather to Discuss “Gods”–Live Book Group Chat 8/20!

Has your book group read (or is planning to read) The Gods of Heavenly Punishment? Don’t have a book group, but still want to talk about the book? Interested in the book even if you haven’t read it yet, and wondering what others are saying about it? Join me and groupsourcing super site Togather.com August 20 for an intimate yet electronically-expansive (...)

Music to Bomb To

Last month, I had the honor of being featured on Largehearted Boy, David Gutowski’s inspired music blog. The quest: to come up with a playlist for The Gods of Heavenly Punishment. No easy task–but after much ruminating and iTunes-searching and all-around musical procrastination I managed to compile one. Here is the result: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment is a novel (...)

How An Act of Incest Changed The Way I Write

When asked about who or what I find inspiring as a writer, I tend to find myself floundering. An obsessive reader who consumes three or four novels at a time, the term “inspiration” evokes not one source for me, but a whole tide of them; fluid and intermingled, perpetually fed by the towering piles on my nightstand and the (...)

On That Pesky Line between History and Fiction

One of the most frequent questions I get as a historical novelist is: “How much of what you write is really history?” It’s a good question. And an important one, I think–especially given how discomfort-making the blending of fact and fiction can be. It’s sort of the literary version of mixing beer and liquor: for some people, even the idea (...)

On War, Image and Photography…a Literate Lens Look at “Gods”

“If everyone could be there just once, to see for themselves what white phosphorous does to the face of a child, or what unspeakable pain is caused by the impact of a single bullet or how a jagged piece of shrapnel can rip someone’s leg off – if everyone could be there to see the fear and the grief, just one time, then they’d (...)

Remembering a Fallen Writer — With Her Own Book

In December of 2017, my good friend and writing colleague Sarah Coleman passed away mere days before the finished versions of her luminous novel The Realist came out. Below is a piece I wrote for Publishers Weekly about how our writing group tried to pick up the mantle. Kafka described writing as “utter solitude, the descent into the cold (...)
The Deplorable Within Us

Here is a piece I wrote for McSweeney’s recently, exploring the origins of my latest novel and the eerie, increasing resonance I felt writing it after 2016: My forthcoming novel Wunderland evolved from an impulse to explore a history that — at first — seemed comfortably removed from my own. I’d long been fascinated by Nazi Germany, not so (...)
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Art of Subversion

Last January, I wrote a guest post for my late friend Sarah Coleman’s fantastic photography/literature blog The Literate Lens. Its themes seem strikingly relevant today, so I thought it was worth reposting. In the run-up to the presidential election last November, few of Donald Trump’s proposals sparked quite as much alarm as his idea for a Muslim “registry.” The idea (...)