The Gods of Heavenly Punishment

Jennifer Cody Epstein

“The Next Big Thing” Interview Series

My dear friend, colleague and mentor Joanna Hershon, who is easily one of the most talented and gracious writers I know, recently tagged me for The Next Big Thing self-interview series. The scoop: writers answer the same nine questions about their forthcoming books or works-in-progress. I thought it would be a great way to introduce new readers to my new novel The Gods of (...)

“Gods” By the Numbers (According to the WSJ)

This is a fun piece that ran March 11 in the Wall Street Journal‘s “Culture Count,” a whimsical column written by Lizzie Simon that covers all things arts in the Big Apple. I love the graphic they came up with–my book by the numbers! (Below–the image of the Raymonds dressed up in traditional Japanese court attire.) (...)

On Writing Fire

The firebombing of Tokyo stands among the most brutal air raids in history. Shortly after midnight on March 9, 1945, hundreds of American B-29 bombers roared over the Japanese capital, raining high-tech incendiaries and an early incarnation of napalm onto a city constructed largely of wood and paper. A hundred thousand people died that night; sixteen square miles of urban (...)

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 (...)