Jonathan Safran Foer - Biography

Jonathan Safran Foer (born February 21, 1977) is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). In 2009, he published a work of nonfiction titled Eating Animals.

Early life

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Edison Foer, a lawyer, and Esther Safran Foer, the Polish-born president of a public-relations company. Foer is the middle son in his tight-knit Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is the former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother Joshua is a freelance journalist. Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."

Foer attended Georgetown Day School and Princeton University. In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton, Safran Foer took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy". Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Safran Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.

After graduating from Princeton, Foer attended briefly the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.

Career

Foer graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a degree in Philosophy, and traveled to Ukraine to expand his thesis. In 2001, he edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe." His Princeton thesis grew into a novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. The book earned him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award. In 2005, Liev Schreiber wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel, which starred Elijah Wood.

Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was published in 2005. In the novel, Foer used 9/11 as a backdrop for the story of 9-year-old Oskar Schell, who learns how to deal with the death of his father in the World Trade Center. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close used many nontraditional writing techniques known as visual writing. It follows multiple but interconnected storylines, is peppered with photographs of doorknobs and other such oddities, and ends with a 14-page flipbook. Foer's use of these techniques resulted in both glowing praise and excoriation from critics. Despite diverse criticism, the novel sold briskly and was translated into several languages. In addition, the film rights were purchased by Warner Bros. and Paramount for a film to be produced by Scott Rudin, with Billy Elliot and The Reader director Stephen Daldry attached to direct.

In 2005, Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera on September 14, 2005.

Foer has been an occasional vegetarian (some years vegetarian, some years omnivore, occasionally vegan) since the age of 10, and in 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., a harsh exposé of the kosher certification process that advocates vegetarianism. In his childhood, teen, and college years of vegetarianism, he called himself vegetarian but still often ate animals. Foer writes he is now a vegetarian. He does not mention being vegan in his writings. Foer published his first book of non-fiction, Eating Animals, on November 2, 2009. Foer said that he had long been "uncertain about how I felt [about eating meat]" and that the birth of his first child inspired "an urgency because I would have to make decisions on his behalf." The book intersperses a personal narrative with a more "broad argument" about vegetarianism.

In spring 2008, Foer taught writing for the first time as a visiting professor of fiction at Yale University. He is currently a professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and published his third novel, Tree of Codes, in November 2010.

Personal life

In June 2004, Foer married Nicole Krauss. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children.

Awards

In 2000, Foer was awarded the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Prize, in 2003 he won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and in 2007 he was included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 2. In Spring 2007, Foer stayed at the American Academy in Berlin as a Holtzbrinck Fellow.

Criticism

In spite of his success, Foer is viewed by some as a polarizing figure in modern literature, due to his frequent use of modernist literary devices. Harry Siegel of the New York Press, titled an article on Foer, "Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False", highlighting the flaws in his style: "Foer is supposed to be our new Philip Roth, though his fortune-cookie syllogisms and pointless illustrations and typographical tricks don't at all match up to or much resemble Roth even at his most inane."

Works

Novels

• Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
• Tree of Codes (2010)

Non-fiction books

• Eating Animals (2009)

Short stories

• "The Very Rigid Search" (excerpted from Everything Is Illuminated) (The New Yorker, June 18, 2001)
• "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe" (included in A Convergence of Birds)
• "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" (The New Yorker, June 10, 2002)
• "The Sixth Borough" (became part of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; also featured in the collection "Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creature from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out."[1])
• "Cravings"
• "About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition" (The Guardian, December 2, 2002)
• "Room After Room" (included in Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 2,"Granta 97" published in 2007)
• "Rhoda" (published in The Book of Other People, 2008)
• "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" (The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010)

Other

• "Imagining Giovanni's Gift", Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 20 (Spring 2000)
• "The Proximity of Brad to Bradford: A Brief Introduction to the Lifework of Bradford Morrow", Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 20 (Spring 2000)
• A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell (2001), Editor and contributor
• Sock Monkeys: 200 Out of 1,863 (2002), Contributor: "Il Fait Plus Froid Ailleurs"
• Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (2003), Contributor: "The Very Rigid Search"
• The Future Dictionary of America (2004), Co-editor, with Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, and Eli Horowitz
• The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud (2004), Introduction.
• Masters of American Comics edited by John Carlin (2005), Contributor: "Breakdownable"
• The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning (2005), collects "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" and an excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• "A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah", The New York Times (December 22, 2005) Op-ed piece
• Joe, photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto, designed by Takaaki Matsumoto (2006) Text by Foer
• "My Life as a Dog", The New York Times (November 27, 2006) Op-ed piece
• The Diary of Petr Ginz, edited by Chava Pressburger (2007), Contributor: "What We Say We Are"
• The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, by Bruno Schultz (Penguin Classics Edition 2008), Forward
• "La Vie on Pose", Vogue December 2008
• Ron Arad: No Discipline (MoMA 2009), Contributor: "You Look Up Escape Artist"

External links

• Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals Site for Foer's new book
• Authortrek page on Foer; includes numerous links to articles, interview and information.
• Who is Augustine? Exploratory site for Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Everything Is Illuminated' (Novel)
• Jonathan Safran Foer 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.
• "Who in the world is JSF?" - interview with the St. Petersburg Times of Tampa Bay, Florida.
• Author interview in Guernica Magazine (Guernicamag.com)
• "Something happened" - Guardian Unlimited article
• "Author Podcast Interview" - interview with Paula Shackleton BookBuffet.com