Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Everything Is Illuminated | 2002 |
| Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close | 2005 |
| Tree of Codes | 2010 |
| Here I Am | 2016 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning | 2005 |
| Eating Animals | 2009 |
| We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast | 2019 |
About Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer (born 21 February 1977 in Washington, D.C.) is an American novelist known for “Everything Is Illuminated” (2002), “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2005) and “Here I Am” (2016). He has also written two non-fiction books about food and the environment, “Eating Animals” and “We Are the Weather”.
Foer is the middle of three sons in a Jewish family; his mother, Esther Safran Foer, is the child of Holocaust survivors, his older brother Franklin is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother Joshua founded Atlas Obscura. He attended Georgetown Day School and then Princeton University, where an introductory writing course with Joyce Carol Oates in 1995 first made him think of writing seriously. He graduated in philosophy in 1999. Oates advised his creative writing thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. He briefly attended Mount Sinai School of Medicine before leaving to write.
After Princeton he travelled to Ukraine to expand the thesis, which grew into “Everything Is Illuminated”, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. It won a National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and in 2005 Liev Schreiber wrote and directed a film version starring Elijah Wood.
“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” tells the story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father died in the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The novel includes photographs and ends with a 14-page flipbook, devices that drew both praise and scorn from critics. It was filmed by the director Stephen Daldry. “Tree of Codes” (2010), published by Visual Editions in London, is an artwork in book form made from a book by Bruno Schulz.
“Eating Animals” (2009), a New York Times bestseller, examines factory farming and the ethics of eating meat, a subject he returned to in “We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast” (2019). His most recent novel, “Here I Am”, appeared in September 2016. Foer first taught writing at Yale University in 2008 and now teaches creative writing at New York University.
Photo: David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).