Jonathan Safran
Foer
(1977 - )
Jonathan Safran Foer is a Jewish-American writer who lives in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss, and their dog, George. To date he has written two novels.
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Biography
Born in Washington, D.C., Foer attended Princeton University where he 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."
He has been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and his short stories include "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" and "The Sixth Borough." "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" is also to be found in the collection of short stories edited by Dave Eggers, "The Burned Children of America" and in "The Unabridged Pocket Book of Lightening," produced as part of the Penguin 70's series, while "The Sixth Borough," in a slightly altered form, is incorporated into Foer's second novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."
He traveled to Ukraine in 1999 to research his grandfather's life. Though he had not originally planned it, this trip resulted in 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 has been adapted to film by the director Liev Schreiber and features Elijah Wood in the lead role. It came out 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. Although this novel was not as well received by critics as the debut, it has sold briskly and been translated into several languages, and the film rights have been bought.
Foer is also the younger brother of Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, who recently wrote How Soccer Explains the World. His younger brother Josh is also a journalist, specializing in science writing.
Novels
* Everything is Illuminated (2002)
* Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
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