Meet the Author

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of such awards as the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize. Foer was named one of Rolling Stone's "People of the Year" and Esquire's "Best and Brightest."

Foer graduated from Princeton University with a philosophy degree. While a freshman at Princeton, Foer took an introductory fiction writing course with noted author Joyce Carol Oates, who encouraged him to pursue his talent. "It was a revelation," Foer said, "It had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as 'my writing.' I thought the thing I was doing was just fulfilling the assignments."¹ After much work and revision, Foer's undergraduate thesis, with Oates as his advisor, turned into his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002). 

Everything Is Illuminated is a story about searching for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future. The book follows a young American's journey to Ukraine in search for the woman who saved his grandfather's life from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past. As their adventure unfolds, Jonathan imagines the history of his grandfather's village, conjuring a magical fable of startling symmetries that unite generations across time.²

The novel was adapted into a movie directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) is Foer's second novel. He also published Eating Animals (2009), a non-fiction work that explores food production, cultural association of food, and humane agricultural methods. His third creative work of fiction, Tree of Codes (2011) was constructed by taking an existing book, Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, and cutting out words to form a completely new story. With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story.³

Jonathan Safran Foer is married to fellow novelist Nicole Kraus and lives in Brooklyn with their two children.