Jennifer Cody Epstein

Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of international bestseller The Painter from Shanghai. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Asian Wall Street Journal, Self, Mademoiselle and NBC, and has worked in Hong Kong, Japan and Bangkok, Thailand. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two daughters.

Epstein's new novel is The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading.  Her reply:

I seem to be on a paranormal kick at the moment, which is odd for me but (I find) highly addictive. I just finished Heidi Julavits’s The Vanishers, which is a super-smart, darkly-comic novel about catty female psychics attacking each other from both beyond and before the grave. I’m also mid-way through Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, which covers everything from the citrus-loving undead to Japanese girls who turn into living silkworms to mysteriously life-defining seagulls in a small town in the ‘70s. Lastly, I just started Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist, in which a Milton-quoting atheist suddenly finds himself chased around the globe by very real and spooky demons. I’ve loved all three books, though I will admit they make me feel rather ploddingly uninventive and overly-earnest in terms of my own work…like maybe I need to throw a werewolf who communicates with the dead or an empathetic cross-dressing ghost into my next historical novel. Or something.

Visit Jennifer Cody Epstein's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

--Marshal Zeringue