Tuesday Jul 18, 2023
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE @ the Archway
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street @ the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
Get Tickets Here!
This event will be IN-PERSON – masks recommended. RSVP here!
About the Book.
Two women fall under the influence of a powerful doctor in Paris’s notorious women’s asylum in this gripping historical novel inspired by true events, from the bestselling author of Wunderland.When Josephine arrives at the Salpêtrière asylum, she is covered in blood, badly bruised, and suffering from amnesia. She is quickly diagnosed with what the Paris papers are calling “the epidemic of the age”: hysteria, a disease is so baffling and widespread that Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot, the asylum’s famous director, devotes many of his popular public lectures to the malady. Charcot often uses hypnosis to prompt his patients to reproduce their hysterical symptoms, and to his delight, Josephine proves extraordinarily susceptible to this unconscious manipulation. He is soon featuring the young woman on his stage, entrancing her into fantastical acts and hallucinatory fits before enraptured audiences and eager newsmen—many of whom feature her on their papers’ front pages.Laure, a ward attendant assigned to care for Charcot’s new favorite, knows that Josephine’s diagnosis is a godsend. Life in the Salpêtrière’s Hysteria ward is far easier than in its dreaded Lunacy division, from which few inmates ever return. But as Josephine’s fame grows, her memory starts to return—and with it, images of a terrible crime she’s convinced she’s committed. Haunted by these visions, and ensnared in Charcot’s hypnotic web, she starts spiraling into seeming insanity. Desperate to save the girl she has grown to love, Laure begins to plot their escape from the Salpêtrière and its doctors. First, though, she must confirm whether Josephine is truly a madwoman, doomed to die in the asylum—or a murderer, destined for the guillotine.Both are dark possibilities—but not nearly as dark as what Laure unearths when she sets out to discover the truth.
About the Author.
Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of the USA Today bestseller Wunderland, now out in paperback. Her prior works include The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, winner of the 2014 Asian Pacific Association of Librarians Honor award for outstanding fiction, as well as the international bestseller The Painter from Shanghai. She has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Nation (Thailand), Self and Mademoiselle magazines, and the NBC and HBO networks, working in Kyoto, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok as well as Washington D.C. and New York. She has taught at Columbia University in New York and Doshisha University in Kyoto.
She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
About the Moderator.
Joanna Hershon is the author Swimming and The Outside of August. Her short fiction has been published in One Story and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons.
