Jonathan Safran Foer (b.1977) is an American novelist. This creative writing teacher at New York University is celebrated for his first novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005.)
Born to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., Foer graduated from Princeton in 1999 with a philosophy degree. As part of his undergraduate thesis, he traveled to Ukraine to search for a woman who, he had learned, had saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The resulting account of a young, self-deprecating author resulted in the widely acclaimed first novel Everything is Illuminated (2002.) It was an international success, and it was made into a film directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood.
Foer also wrote Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005; 2011 film starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock) and Here I Am (2016.) His non-fiction works are Eating Animals (2009,) advocating an absolute boycott of factory-farmed animals, and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jonathan Safran Foer
Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
—Jonathan Safran Foer
Topics: Future
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
—Jonathan Safran Foer
I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.
—Jonathan Safran Foer
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