Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer comes from an intellectual, Jewish family; his mother’s parents were Holocaust survivors. After graduating from Princeton, Foer traveled to Ukraine to research his family’s roots. Foer incorporated this journey into his thesis from Princeton to write his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, which weaves historical fiction with autobiography in two parallel but interconnected plots. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is Foer’s second novel, and he expands upon his method of braided storylines by adding visual materials and complex narration. Since Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Foer has written in a wide variety of genres. His third book, Eating Animals, is a nonfiction treatise about factory farming and slaughterhouses in which he explores his own vegetarianism. Foer experiments with forms throughout his work: his novel Tree of Codes, is a cross between a story and a sculpture: he removed letters and words from Polish author Bruno Schulz’s book The Street of Crocodiles to create a new story. He has also written an opera libretto and edited many books, from The Future Dictionary of America to a new translation of the Jewish religious text the Haggadah.