Jonathan Safran Foer

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For the Australian media personality, see John Safran.

Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977) is an American writer best known for his 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss, their son Sasha, and their dog George.

1 Biography
2 Criticism
3 Works
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Born in Washington, D.C., Foer attended Georgetown Day School and Princeton University, where he studied philosophy and literature and was awarded the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prizes. In 2000, he was awarded the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Prize. He is the editor of the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell for which he also wrote the short story "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe." At Princeton, he took a class with Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in him and helped launch him to broad fame.^[1]

He was awarded a Bronfman fellowship for study in Israel.

Foer has been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times and The New Yorker. His short stories include "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" and "The Sixth Borough". "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" can also be found The Burned Children of America (a collection of short stories edited by Dave Eggers), and in The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning (produced as part of the Pocket Penguins series). An altered version of "The Sixth Borough" is incorporated into Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

He traveled to Ukraine in 1999 to research his grandfather's life. This trip resulted in the inspiration for his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin. The book garnered him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award.

Everything is Illuminated was adapted to film by the director Liev Schreiber and features Elijah Wood in the lead role. The film was released on September 16, 2005.

In his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, published in 2005, Foer uses 9/11 as a backdrop in the story of 9-year-old Oskar Schell learning to deal with the death of his father in the World Trade Center. Although this novel was not as well-received by critics as the debut, it has sold briskly and been translated into several languages. In addition, the film rights have been purchased.

A vegetarian since the age of 10, Foer recorded the narration for "If This Is Kosher..." ^[2] (2006), a harsh exposé of the kosher certification process that advocates vegetarianism and also includes Rabbi David Wolpe and Rabbi Irving Greenberg.

Foer is the middle child of three sons. His older brother Franklin is the editor of The New Republic. His younger brother Joshua is a freelance journalist specializing in science writing. Foer married Nicole Krauss in June 2004. Their first child, Sasha, was born in February 2006.

[edit] Criticism

Foer is one of the more controversial novelists of the past decade, not for the content of his writing, but rather for the extremely polarized responses he elicits from readers. The initial release of Illuminated received overwhelming acclaim, not only from major publications, but also from many well-known authors, including John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, and Dale Peck. Some of the reviews verged on the hyperbolic, particularly in The Times, which proclaimed that the book was "a work of genius," that Foer had "staked his claim for literary greatness," and that "after it, things will never be the same."

Detractors of Foer find his work gimmicky and overly ambitious. Particularly bothersome to some readers is the virtual catalogue of modernist devices he employed in his first novel, including time shifts, dialect writing, fanciful mock-history, dramatic prose, poetic devices, and stream-of-consciousness. The frequency of these devices strike some as insincere and pretentious. The most notorious of these critics is Harry Siegel of the New York Press, who bluntly subtitled an article on Foer, "Why the author of Everything is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack."

Recent criticism has taken a more evenhanded view, acknowledging the breathless silliness of some of the writer's early acclaim, while appreciating his considerable talent. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books about Foer's growing body of work ^[3], Wyatt Mason said "Foer has shown both an unusual faith in the power of written communication and a true believer’s willingness to test its limits."

[edit] Works

[edit] Short stories

"The Very Rigid Search" (eventually developed into Everything is Illuminated, in The New Yorker, June 18, 2001)
"If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe" (found in A Convergence of Birds)
"A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" (in The New Yorker, June 10, 2002)
"The Sixth Borough"
"Cravings"

[edit] Novels

Everything is Illuminated (2002)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

[edit] Other

A Convergence of Birds (2001), an anthology of poetry and fiction which Foer edited
The Future Dictionary of America (2004), an anthology edited by Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, and the staff of McSweeney's
The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning (2005), contains "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" and an excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
"A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah," a December 22, 2005 op-ed in The New York Times
Joe (2006), photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto ; text by Jonathan Safran Foer ; designed by Takaaki Matsumoto