Jonathan Safran Foer author photo
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Jonathan Safran Foer

Né(e): February 21, 1977 – Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Liens sociaux:

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and essayist whose work explores memory, family, trauma, identity, and ethics. He is best known for Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals. His books have been translated widely, and Everything Is Illuminated won the National Jewish Book Award.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

Jonathan Safran Foer emerged from a Washington, D.C., upbringing in a Jewish family shaped by the long afterlife of Holocaust memory, but he did not set out early with a fixed plan to become a novelist. At Princeton, an early creative-writing class with Joyce Carol Oates became the decisive turning point: her encouragement gave him a sense that “his writing” existed as something serious, and the work he developed there eventually grew into Everything Is Illuminated. That debut announced him as a young writer of unusual formal ambition, someone willing to treat inherited history, family mythology, and comic invention as parts of the same emotional landscape. Rather than building an audience through a personal website or newsletter, he came to prominence in a more traditional way—through books, criticism, and literary attention that accumulated quickly around the force of the work itself. ((https://paw.princeton.edu/article/foer-99-oates-share-writing-life))

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Citations

quote
Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life
-Middlebury College Commencement Speech
quote
I wrote the book in English because it’s my language
-GBH Interview: Here I Am
quote
I don’t think of myself as an activist
-The White Review Interview
quote
If we could move away from the notion of getting it all the way right, and just making better choices and having greater consciousness
-The Full Foer
quote
The thing I love in books is that the voice is mine
-Birnbaum v. Jonathan Safran Foer
quote
I was blowing air into a deflating balloon, trying to keep the shape of being a writer
-Jonathan Safran Foer’s Family Drama
quote
I am a chronic sufferer of “Jonathan block” – the inability to value my thoughts
-My Writing Day
quote
One needn’t believe in miracles to experience them. But one must be present for them
-technology is diminishing us
quote
The goal is always to write something I’m proud of
-This Much I Know

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